DOHA: Cricket Australia is staring at a staggering loss of 300 million Australian dollars if the ICC T20 World Cup is not held on time due to Covid-19 pandemic.
Travel restrictions and question marks over how long it would take to contain the pandemic has put the future of T20 World Cup and India’s tour of Australia in doubt.
The T20 World Cup is scheduled for October 18 start while India’s tour of Australia will begin with a T20 tri-series in October and end with a four-match Test series in December.
“I’d love to see an Australia-India Test series this summer and I’d really like to be able to see the World Cup go ahead,” Sports Minister Richard Colbeck told SEN Radio.
“The issue is not so much the teams as the crowds and that’s probably one of the hurdles we really have to consider and probably one that world cricket will look at pretty closely as well.”
Colbeck said logistics of hosting the event in the post COVID-19 world can be dealt with.
“We all know the difference in atmosphere … but in a team sense I’d like to think that we can build some protocols with the cooperation of the sport and the players, that’s going to be extremely important, with appropriate quarantine and bio-security protocols to see if we can make the competition go ahead,” he said.
The International Cricket Council (ICC) has played down speculation this year’s T20 World Cup in Australia could be pushed back to 2021 but admitted it was “exploring all options”.
Australia is due to stage the global tournament from October 18 until November 15 but the coronavirus pandemic has already created havoc for international sport and more events could suffer.
