Amidst Covid-19 scare, BCCI considers moving the IPL to Mumbai as they look to minimise the risks.
Shifting the Indian Premier League tournament to Mumbai is emerging as the serious option for BCCI after several Covid-19 positive cases were reported from different franchises on Monday.
Kolkata Knight Riders’ two players, Varun Chakravarthy and Sandeep Warrier, were found positive, while three staff members from Chennai Super Kings, including Lakshmipathy Balaji, had also tested positive. The cases were reported from two venues currently hosting the tournament – Ahmedabad and Delhi. If things go as planned, Mumbai could be hosting the tournament from the weekend.
This will mean that the schedule will be rejigged with more double-headers. There’s also a possibility of the IPL final being moved from May 30 to early June.
Now the biggest challenge in front of the BCCI in making the Mumbai plan work is creating a secure bio-bubble, which entails finding hotels for the eight teams to be placed in and preparing the stadia. Fortunately, all three grounds in Mumbai – Wankhede, DY Patil and Brabourne are match-ready.
Wankhede stadium has hosted 10 IPL matches in the early leg of the tournament, while the other two grounds and Maharashtra Cricket Association’s facility in Bandra-Kurla complex were used by various teams for training purposes.
“Stadiums, hotel-booking and air-travel will be BCCI’s biggest challenges. Stadiums have to be made match-ready, hotels are a concern because some are Covid centres, especially in south Mumbai.
The Board is working on it. Air-travel has to be coordinated well. Entry and exit points at the airports have been a matter of concern. Many franchises who did their own internal contact-tracing concluded that airport terminals may have led to a breach in the bio-bubble,”
sources tracking developments quoted to TOI.
It is learnt that the BCCI has made calls on Monday to multiple big hotels in Mumbai to verify if they were capable of satisfying the various SOPs needed to create a team bubble. The BCCI admits that the logistics involved in this shift will be massive, and the entire process needs to be planned thoroughly to avoid any breaches.
Officials of the BCCI are understood to have spoken with Aaditya Thackeray, Maharashtra’s cabinet minister for tourism and environment, requesting him to facilitate these matches, and the government appears to have given the go-ahead under strict protocols.
The BCCI will have to scrap the current two-venue model and revert back to its original plan, when it was working out the IPL schedule with Mumbai as the hub. On March 7, the BCCI had announced six venues – Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. Chennai and Mumbai hosted the first leg while the second leg is going on currently in Ahmedabad and Delhi.
The IPL’s next leg is slated to be in Bengaluru and Kolkata, starting next week. However, with the Covid-19 situation worsening daily in India due to a second wave of the pandemic and the news coming of the IPL bubble being breached, franchises, players and even some within the BCCI remain concerned about the hazards involved in travelling to different cities.
Ahead of the IPL, Mumbai was the worst-affected metro city in India, with almost 10,000 new cases every day. But things have changed, and a huge improvement has been seen in this respect. Monday’s case count of 2,662 was the lowest daily tally since March 17. It’s a steep drop in comparison from a month ago, where 11,163 covid-19 cases were reported on April 4, the highest-ever number in the pandemic.
If the IPL is stretched beyond May 30, it could potentially have an impact on the World Test Championship final between India and New Zealand in Southampton from June 18-22. With the UK recently restricting travel from India, the ICC is currently negotiating quarantine protocols and exemptions with the British government for both teams.
A BCCI official pointed out that the IPL shift to Mumbai could be advantageous for the Indian and New Zealand players to fly direct to England instead of the two-leg journey if the IPL final were to be played in Ahmedabad, as scheduled.
