Lorgat defends World Cup stadium preparations

World Cup preparations at several stadiums are still running behind schedule, but the ICC chief executive, Haroon Lorgat, remains confident there will be no Commonwealth Games-style last-minute dash to complete the work. The opening World Cup game is five weeks away, but several venues, including Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, which will host the final, are not yet ready.

Last month, an ICC inspection team confirmed that Wankhede Stadium and Eden Gardens in Kolkata, had failed to meet the November 30 construction deadline, and if they weren't ready by January 15, there could be no guarantees they would be handed over for the ICC event. That date has now arrived, but Lorgat played down concerns about the state of the grounds.

"You're probably referring to Kolkata or Wankhede," Lorgat said in Melbourne, when asked about the readiness of the venues. "There are certain stadia that are behind our schedule; we would have liked them to have been completed [by now]. I certainly do not envisage, and all of our reports do not indicate, anything like what transpired during the Commonwealth Games.

"The stadiums are slightly behind - there's four in particular, I think - but we'll be done before the start of the World Cup. Most of the stadiums are complete and ready. There are no alarm bells ringing. I'm sure that we'll be ready well before the start of the World Cup."

The lead-up to last year's Delhi Commonwealth Games was dominated by eleventh-hour efforts to get all the venues up and running, despite the city having had seven years to prepare. The World Cup is arguably more complicated in that it is being held at 13 grounds across three countries, and construction work is just one issue.

Ensuring security at all the stadiums has been another major task for the ICC, but Lorgat said he was happy with the measures in place. He said the organisation had matured in terms of infrastructure and management of security issues, and a more robust process was in place than might have been the case in the past.

"All full-members have now got a security manager and the ICC has got a security manager, unlike in the past where we might have been relying entirely on independent experts or police agencies to provide the security," he said. "We've got quite a co-ordinated approach which has matured very well. I'm quite confident with the measures that we've got in place ... that it will be well done."