Breathless in cricket’s bio-bubble
MASKS ON How hard will it be for IPL players to spend 80 days under strict restrictions in the UAE’S sanitised zones?
nMUMBAI: By the time the West Indies Test side (which restarted international cricket against England in England) was ready to take their chartered flight back home, the boys from the Caribbean were mentally worn thin. They had, after all, spent 51 consecutive days in two bio-secure bubbles – in Southampton for the first Test and then in Manchester for the next two.
Jason Holder and his men will tell you 51 days is a long time to be kept in near-solitude. Then imagine what nearly 80 days in strict containment zones is going to be like for the players restarting the Indian Premier League in UAE next month.
The biggest factor that has allowed the resumption of cricket (international or franchise) is the promise of bio-bubbles – where the players are secured within a perimeter that contains the cricket ground as well as their living facility. During the series against the West Indies and the ongoing one against Pakistan in England, Southampton and Manchester were picked because both grounds hold a luxury hotel within its complex.
While the series progressed flawlessly – no player has yet contracted the virus under the watch of the ECB’S bio-bubble – ensuring protection against the pandemic did pose a great challenge to mental staleness and over-all fatigue.
“That has been really challenging,” Holder said at the end of the series, which they lost 2-1 after having won the first Test. “Mentally, some of the guys are a bit worn out. We were here (at Old Trafford) four weeks prior to the first Test. We had a change of environment at Southampton, which we really enjoyed. But then we had to come back here to see the same people, the same place, the same rooms.”
Sounds like the problems once faced by people in extreme professions – like astronauts, whose heightened sense of isolation-fatigue during a space mission has been captured on celluloid time and again, right from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Cuaron’s Gravity.
This could well be the case again when the eight IPL teams land in the UAE on August 22 to begin their camps -- nearly a month before the tournament is set to begin on September 19 and about 78 days before the final on November 10. The teams will play the edition over three venues in Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi; but each team will have only one of those grounds as their home venue. Then, like Holder aptly put it -- ‘same people, same place and same room’.
“This year’s IPL winner will surely be the one that is strongest when it comes to mental and emotional fitness. In the end it may not even depend on cricketing skills,” says Anand Chulani, mental fitness coach, who has had stints with Kings XI Punjab and Rajasthan Royals in the past.
Aaron Finch, captain of the Australian ODI team, too hopes that the mental-health of his players holds up in these bio-bubbles, as his side prepares to tour England once the Pakistan tour ends. “It could be a few months that you’re in these bio-bubbles and being stuck in these hotel rooms for weeks or months on end can be really tough,” he said in an online press conference on Tuesday.
Those who are unable to selfmotivate will struggle during this long period of containment, feels mental-health expert Chulani. And Finch echoed his thoughts when he said: “”We’re in a position to continue the global game -there should be no more motivation than that.”
“It is easy to be motivated when thousands of people are cheering your name. The key now is activation. Motivation requires someone from the outside to make you feel good about yourself. Activation is when you feeling good about yourself from the inside,” says Chulani, who also works with IPL players on an individual basis.
“If you are a person who can activate yourself, you will get results during the bubble,” he adds.
Mugdha Bavare, a sports psychologist who has been associated with the Mumbai Cricket Association and their cricketers since 2006, believes that the next few months in UAE are going to test even the best. “The mindsets are going to fluctuate heavily in that situation,” Bavare says. Especially so when there are restrictions within the bio-bubble as well. Players are encouraged to be socially distanced and maintain all the Covid-19 protocols that they would at home.
Even someone like Rafael Nadal, who is known for his extreme mental fortitude on a tennis court, has succumbed to the pressures of the Covid-19 restrictions. Sometime during the lockdown, Nadal was quoted as saying: “I want to feel free again and be able to hug my loved ones. I can’t conceive a future where I can’t hug players I haven’t seen in months.”
Many of these IPL players will be seeing each other after a period of five months, and Bavare feels that quick acceptance of the new protocols is important. “When you accept the reality, then you will be able to adjust yourself to any kind of situation. The players must shift their focus onto things they can control and not external factors such as where they cannot travel etc,” she adds.
In normal times, UAE – especially Dubai – is a shopping paradise. While the IPL cricketers will certainly not be able to experience the city’s offers to its fullest, some of the franchises are doing their best to organise their stay in resorts so that the players have a wide range of facilities to take their mind off the routine. “Variety is important because having the same thing over and over again is tiring,” says Chulani.
Sure. But there is one major respite that awaits the seasoned IPL cricketer during his stint in UAE – the daily travel or the lack of it. During editions in India, the IPL player is almost constantly on the move, giving ‘living out of a suitcase’ an all new meaning. While they will have many other headaches to deal with over the next few weeks, the long hours spent packing and waiting at airport waiting rooms will not be among them.