As the T20 World Cup will take place in India later this year, ICC’s interim CEO Geoff Allardice on Wednesday said that they have backup plans in place for the mega event in India. However, they are currently not entertaining any thoughts of shifting it out of the country despite the increasing number of COVID-19 cases.
The World Cup of the shorter format is slated to take place in October-November in India, which is reporting over one lakh daily positive cases for the past few days as well. Amid the crunch time of COVID-19, the IPL is about to begin on Friday in Chennai behind closed doors as well.
“We are certainly proceeding with the event as planned,” Allardice revealed during a virtual media round-table. “Plan B we have, but we haven’t activated those plans yet. We are working with the BCCI, we do have backup plans that can be activated if the time comes.”
ICC‘s general manager, Allardice was recently appointed the interim CEO after Manu Sawhney was sent on “leave” after his behaviour came under the scanner during an internal investigation by UK-based audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers as well.
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The veteran Australian player, who has played domestic cricket for his country, said that the ICC is also in contact with other cricket boards to get an idea of how they are managing amid the crunch time of the COVID-19 era and T20 World Cup could also face trouble too.
“Cricket is being played in a number of countries at the moment and we are learning from all of them. We have been talking to others sports bodies about what they are doing, we are in a good shape at the moment but acknowledge that the world is changing at a rapid rate. We have also got the World Test Championship final coming up in two months’ time, but we are proceeding with both as planned,” he said.
Allardice also admitted that the challenges all the countries are currently facing in order to host cricket tournaments in terms of maintaining communication with their respective governments as well. “The vaccination role in different countries might change the dynamics… They have done an amazing job in the last 10 months in hosting matches.”
