The Lucknow T20I between India and South Africa was abandoned due to smoggy conditions - but it's an issue that the BCCI has refused to resolve over the years.
“The pollution issue doesn’t happen every year.”
That was BCCI Secretary Devajit Saikia in April 2025, explaining why Delhi had been handed a November Test match against South Africa.
Eight months later, after a T20I in Lucknow was abandoned without a ball being bowled, the BCCI vice-president Rajeev Shukla struck a very different note. “It [pollution] is an emergency and needs to be treated like one.”
What is unfortunate is that it took an international game to be called off - after the players and fans had already been put at risk - for an admission of a reality that citizens across the country live with every winter.
The fourth T20I between India and South Africa was scheduled to begin at 7 pm in Lucknow on Wednesday (December 17). It never did. Dense fog (let’s be honest, smog) rolled into the Ekana Stadium early, engulfing the floodlights, the stands and, eventually, any realistic chance of play. Visibility deteriorated rapidly to the point where spotting the opposite end of the ground became difficult. After six inspections and nearly two and a half hours of waiting, the match was called off at 9.25 pm, just 21 minutes before the final cut-off time.
By then, Lucknow’s Air Quality Index, which measures how polluted the air is at any given time, had climbed to 425, firmly in the ‘hazardous’ category. Visibility had dropped to around a kilometre. The cold did not help, with temperatures dipping to about 13 degrees Celsius, but this was not winter fog alone. It was smog, thickened by high concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10, trapped close to the ground. Hardik Pandya warming up earlier in the evening with a mask over his face captured the mood neatly: being expected to go about a normal routine in conditions visibly unsafe for sustained physical effort.
What unfolded in Lucknow was not an outlier, but a familiar winter pattern across North India year after year; Delhi leading the charts with the poorest AQI levels. The post-Diwali pollution spikes are driven by a combination of firecracker emissions, stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, as well as construction dust and industrial activity. Delhi alone has over one crore registered vehicles, with transport contributing a significant share of particulate pollution. As winter sets in, the cold temperatures trap these pollutants close to the surface, while low wind speeds and fog prevent dispersal.
An AQI below 50 is considered good. Above 150 is unhealthy. Above 300 is hazardous. The November air in the northern parts of India routinely crosses 400 and, in recent years, has pushed beyond 700. Prolonged exposure at these levels is linked to respiratory, ocular, and cardiovascular problems, even among people with minimal physical activity. For professional athletes spending hours outdoors, the risk is obvious.
That was precisely why, despite Saikia’s initial stance, the Test match was eventually rescheduled out of Delhi. The city instead hosted a Test against the West Indies before Diwali, which was in the last week of October. The danger was acknowledged, but the winter T20I in Lucknow, also in North India, stayed where it was. The BCCI also hosted two other T20Is against South Africa in the north - in Chandigarh and Dharamsala, both in chilly temperatures. The abandonment in Lucknow, around 550 kilometres from Delhi, punctured the long-held assumption that the pollution problem is restricted to the capital and its immediate surroundings. It isn’t. It is far more serious.
This was not the first time cricket had been disrupted by northern India’s winter air. In November 2016, Ranji Trophy matches in Delhi were called off due to smog. A year later, during a Test against Sri Lanka, Indian players struggled to breathe, fielders wore masks, and an oxygen cylinder was kept ready in the dressing room. In 2019, two Bangladesh players vomited on the field during an ODI in the capital city. In 2023, a World Cup game involving Bangladesh and Sri Lanka was nearly moved out of Delhi, with Bangladesh cancelling their training ahead of the match.
The pollution conversation has also refused to stay confined to cricket. On December 15, as Lionel Messi appeared at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi as part of the GOAT Tour, fans cut through the celebration with chants of “AQI, AQI” as Delhi’s chief minister walked onto the podium. That evening, the capital’s average air quality sat firmly in the ‘severe’ range, marking the third consecutive day of extreme pollution. The solution that’s been proposed by the Delhi Pollution Control Committee? Ban ‘tandoors’, or clay ovens using charcoals or wood to slow cook traditional foods like kebabs or naans, which are used routinely across the older parts of the city! But let’s leave that as a conversation for another day…
BCCI’s recent scheduling muddle
The Lucknow abandonment also fits into a wider pattern of scheduling decisions that have lacked a sense of planning. The 2023 ODI World Cup schedule, initially released just three months before the tournament, was later altered due to festival clashes. The Women’s World Cup calendar this year was announced barely a month in advance, limiting fan travel. Even then, the schedule was changed again, leaving travelling fans in anguish. An IPL fixture between KKR and LSG had to be rescheduled due to the date clashing with a festival this year. Just weeks ago, Test matches were staged in Guwahati and Kolkata during winter evenings, where the sun sets before 5 pm local time. In Guwahati, particularly, where it's dark by 4.30 pm, the match began earlier, and tea was taken before lunch to maximise daylight. It might have worked, but the question remained: What was the need?
This is no longer about one abandoned T20I due to a polluted city. It is about how fixtures are planned in a vast country that stretches almost 3,214km in length and 2,933km in breadth, thus offering every possible climate and condition. Pollution in the north? Move down to the south. Rain in the west? Play games in the north. Early sunset in the east? Play games in the far west. Want to escape soaring temperatures? Go to the east for the night games. And yet, the BCCI has almost made it a habit of finding itself stuck with the avoidables - early sunsets in the east, winter fog and pollution in the north, and festival clashes that force last-minute changes.
None of these are unknown variables, but when matches still need rescheduling, and the fans are robbed of a chance to see their heroes for no fault of theirs, it points to an absence of proper planning. More broadly, it remains a question of accountability.
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