The next global event under International Cricket Council happens to the ICC World T2O, set to be held in India this year. It would be the seventh edition of the prestigious Twenty20 International tournament and the second to be held in India, with the last edition in 2016 also conducted in the same, won by the Windies.
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Although India was supposed to host the ICC Champions Trophy this year, after ICC decided to discontinue the event, it was replaced by the WT20. It would also be the first men's global cricket competition in the pandemic era.
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Meanwhile, with the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, it is unclear how the tournament would go ahead in India. Currently, India is going through a second wave of COVID-19, with over 1,15,000 new cases being reported on Tuesday, as another national lockdown is being contemplated.
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As a result, ICC's interim CEO, Geoff Allardice, has stated that provided India fails to host the tournament successfully, it has contingency plans in place. "Yes, we have [backup plans]. But, at this stage, we haven't activated those plans because we are preparing to go ahead with the event in India as scheduled. We're working with the BCCI and different elements of that event at the moment, but we do have backup plans that can be activated when the time's right," he was reported as saying by multiple news agencies.
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"We're not anywhere near that timeline yet. We've certainly got a number of months to be able to see how the situation is and how cricket events are being run. We've obviously got our World Test Championship final which is coming up in a couple of months too. One match and two teams, but it's still got its own challenges. We're proceeding with both as planned at this stage," he added.
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Before the WT20, ICC would host the ICC World Test Championship final in Southampton between India and New Zealand in June. However, with the event being a one-game affair, it would not be an uphill task to host in the United Kingdom, which has not seen any spike in the cases of late.
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With COVID vaccines already in the market now, experts and fans are backing cricketing organisations, including ICC, to get the players vaccinated. However, Allardice refuted ICC's position to negotiate vaccinations for the players with the respective global countries' governments.
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"I think our medical committee and our board are recommending that participants should be vaccinated wherever possible, but I think the dynamic in each country is going to be different, both with the supply of vaccine or the availability of the vaccine, and where sportspeople or international sportspeople might be in the queue to receive those vaccines. The ICC wouldn't be able to influence anything like that at a national level. Still, our overall message has been, we recommend that participants coming to our events in the future are vaccinated wherever possible," Allardiceconcluded.
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