After the Indian Premier League was postponed due to the ongoing crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is looking at the October-November window with a hope that the ICC T20 World Cup be postponed.
The 13th edition of the IPL, which was scheduled to be played from March 29, has been postponed to April 15. With India in the middle of a 21-day lockdown till April 14 in an attempt to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, the fate of this year’s cash-rich league looks grim.
Thus, BCCI is hoping that the ICC postpones the T20 World Cup which is due to be played between October 18 and November 15.
“At present, there is a lockdown of borders and while Australia has said it is a potential six-month lockdown, things can change with an improvement in the scenario. The UK could follow the same pattern considering the spread of the pandemic. We are still to understand what the Indian government will decide with regard to closing the international borders. In such a scenario, the only window that looks safe is the October-November one. But again, that collides with the T20 World Cup,” a BCCI official was quoted as saying by IANS.
With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to spew venom and the number of fatalities and infected people around the world increasing rapidly, normalcy looks a distant dream at the moment.
However, the BCCI official has admitted that a lot of calculations will be involved for such a situation to arise. And he hoped that the world learns to tame the novel coronavirus, which has already killed over 37,800 people and affected over 7,85,700 humans, by October.
“So, if the ICC does go ahead and decides to postpone the T20 World Cup due to the current scenario, only then we can look at the October-November window because even if a six-month border closedown is ordered by every country from say now, it ends by the start of October. But again, for that, the spread of the coronavirus needs to be stopped and things must come under human control. In short, there will have to be a lot of maths.
“Again, it would be the last step for the ICC to push the T20 World Cup from 2020 to 2022 because there is no window in 2021. So, at the moment, it is all a bit too far-fetched to be honest. But yes, the October-November window has been spoken about for the IPL, but a lot of external factors need to fall into place for that to become a reality,” the official said.
However, both ICC and Cricket Australia have not given any hint of postponing or rescheduling the marquee event. “There have been no talks of any postponement to the World T20 that is to be held in October and November this year,” said an ICC official.
Meanwhile, a conference call between BCCI, franchise owners and all other stakeholders, which was supposed to figure out an official solution regarding the fate of the IPL 2020, was cancelled last week.