Australia’s Covid restrictions put integrity of Ashes at stake, warns ECB
Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, has put further pressure on the Australian government to relax its strict quarantine rules in order to allow this winter’s Ashes to go ahead.
Several England players have indicated they may pull out of the tour if their families are forced into hard quarantine after arriving in the country, and Harrison insisted the integrity of the series was at stake unless the Australian authorities softened the nation’s hard-line stance.
Talks are continuing between the ECB and Cricket Australia on reaching an acceptable compromise that will allow a full-strength England party to travel. Equally, the Australian government is sensitive to the public backlash that would arise from foreign cricketers and their families being exempted from quarantine while around 38,000 Australian nationals remain stranded abroad and unable to return home.
Harrison’s comments make it clear that England regard the safe and comfortable passage of players’ families to
Australia as a non-negotiable part of the series going ahead. “These are very reasonable requests,” he said.
“The players are in no way asking for anything unreasonable to ensure that their families are going to be in
Australia, and the conditions they’re going to be quarantined in are going to be reasonable. That is a concern, given the 18 months our players have been through. We never want to compromise the integrity of the series, for any reason.”
Harrison also underlined the challenges that his own board had overcome in ensuring the current England versus India series could go ahead. “A huge amount of work’s gone in to get the [Indian players’] families in,” he said. “We had to go all the way to the prime minister’s office, which was the first time in my experience that we’ve had to go to that extent.” He remains optimistic that a solution could be found: “This is not an adversarial conversation. I am very confident we will get to a place where we can fulfil our obligations to tour.”
The issue of player welfare continues to be a delicate balancing act, with legitimate questions to be answered over how England can continue to prioritise the welfare of its players whilst also subjecting them to a brutal summer schedule. The five Tests against India have been squeezed alongside the inaugural edition of the Hundred, affording England’s Test players little or no red-ball practice ahead of a crucial series. Moeen Ali, recalled to the side for the second Test, has not played a first-class game since the tour of India six months ago.
In response Harrison served up his usual rambling word soup, peppered with airy buzz-phrases such as “Covid overlays” and “three-dimen
sional Rubik’s cubes”, while rejecting the proposition that England are simply being forced to play too much cricket. “We don’t play any more cricket than we’re used to playing,” he claimed. “The issue is that our schedule is being squeezed by external forces. What you’re seeing is a coagulation of all these issues.”
Harrison also confirmed that Yorkshire’s long-awaited internal investigation into accusations of systematic racism at the club by their former offspinner Azeem Rafiq would be published imminently. It has been almost a year since Rafiq went public with his experiences, upon which Harrison stated that he intended to take personal responsibility for his case. “My understanding is that it’s near as completed as can be,” he said. “We’re obviously anxious to see that report as soon as we can.”