England players lead IPL exodus
Several foreign players began heading home yesterday after the suspension of the Indian Premier League (IPL), with tournament organisers planning an airlift to Maldives or Sri Lanka for the stranded Australian cohort.
Hours after the lucrative cricket league was suspended on Tuesday because of India’s coronavirus crisis, the English members of the Delhi Capitals squad rushed to Delhi from Ahmedabad to prepare for their return home.
The 38-strong contingent of Australian players, coaches, umpires and media pundits will have to wait longer, though, to get home, in the face of a ban on arrivals from India until at least May 15.
Cricket Australia said there was a plan to get them out of the pandemic-ravaged country by chartered flight “in the next two or three days”.
“What the BCCI are working to do is to move the entire cohort out of India where they will wait until it’s possible to return to Australia,” CA interim CEO Nick Hockley told reporters in Sydney.
“That’s now narrowed down to the Maldives and Sri Lanka.
“The BCCI are committed not only to the first move, but also to putting on a charter to bring them back to Australia.”
The CA official refused to speculate if the league could resume this year.
“I think it’s premature to speculate on that,” he said.
“At the moment, the BCCI are very focused on getting all the players, not just the Australians, home safe.”
Chennai Super Kings’ Australian batting coach Mike Hussey, who has tested positive for Covid-19, will stay back to complete his quarantine period in India.
Players’ union boss Todd Greenberg said the cricketers were under an “enormous amount of stress” in India.
“The public will see our best Australian cricketers as almost superheroes ... but they are human beings,” the CEO of the Australian Cricketers’ Association said.
An IPL official said Delhi’s English cricketers would be joined by compatriots from other franchises on the flight home.
Delhi have three Englishmen — Chris Woakes, Tom Curran and Sam Billings — in their ranks.
Rajasthan Royals wicketkeeper-batsman Jos Buttler is likely to join that flight after a team spokesperson said nearly all of their foreign players had left the squad, though she gave no details.
Britain added India to its travel “red list” last month, which means 10 days of quarantine in a hotel for the English contingent.
India’s coronavirus deaths rose by a record 3,780 during the past 24 hours, a day after it became the second country to cross 20-million infections, after the US.