Staging the Twenty20 World Cup in Australia this year is “unrealistic” in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Cricket Australia (CA) chairman Earl Eddings said yesterday.
The tournament is scheduled to take place from Oct. 18 to Nov. 15 and officials have previously said they were planning for it to proceed on those dates, but with many global borders still closed due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Eddings said that was looking increasingly unlikely.
“While it hasn’t been formally called off this year, or postponed, trying to get 16 countries into Australia in the current world, where most countries are still going through COVID spiking, I think it’s unrealistic, or it’s going to be very, very difficult,” Eddings told reporters.
Cricket Australia has put forward a number of options to the International Cricket Council (ICC), Eddings said.
“The ICC are having meetings as we speak, it’s a bit of a movable feast at the moment,” he said.
Twenty20 World Cup chief executive Nick Hockley, who yesterday took over as interim Cricket Australia chief executive, said that he expected the ICC to make a decision about the tournament next month.
“We’ve got a fantastic local organizing committee who are busy preparing for every eventuality and the decision that will come,” Hockley said.
Australia has so far enjoyed success containing the coronavirus, allowing it to ease restrictions, including letting crowds of up to 10,000 into sports stadiums from next month, but strict international border restrictions remain in place and there are also limits on domestic movement between states, creating an added headache for an event where 45 matches are split between seven cities.
Eddings said India’s Test tour in December and January appears set to go ahead, with the tourists willing to undergo quarantine to enter Australia.
“We’ve had a lot of very positive chats with India, they’re very keen to tour,” he said. “Now it’s a matter of how we get over the hurdles with COVID-19 for them to come into the country.”
However, the Twenty20 World Cup, involving 15 visiting teams and support staff, presents a far greater logistical challenge.
The most likely scenario appears to be rescheduling the tournament next year, but that would depend on the status of the pandemic and finding a spot in the crowded calendar.
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
Jannik Sinner continued his quest to become the first man in history to win five Masters 1000 tournaments in a row with a 6-2, 6-3 victory over Danish qualifier Elmer Moller at the Madrid Open on Sunday. The world leader extended his winning streak to 19 matches, a run that began early March in Indian Wells, and he has captured 24 consecutive victories at the Masters 1000 level, dating back to the Paris Masters last October. Searching for a maiden title at this level on clay, Sinner advanced to the round of 16 at the Caja Magica with a 77-minute performance against
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
RSS