Cricket West Indies [CWI] is exploring the prospects of hosting South Africa in September with Barbados being one of the frontrunners to host the tour.
This was confirmed by CWI Chief Executive Officer [CEO], Johnny Grave who made these revelations on the Mason and Guests show on Tuesday.
Grave, when asked about the South Africa tour said “We very much hope so, I can tell you at the moment we’ve had three calls in the last seven days with our counterparts at Cricket South Africa.”
The CEO laid out a pitch map of what the next few months for Caribbean cricket could look like with the Caribbean Premier League [CPL] looking to take centre stage next month.
“The plan as we are working on now is that the players will come home a week Wednesday, they will have the weekend at home, those that are in the Caribbean Premier League will head down to Trinidad on probably the third of August, so a very quick turnaround, the CPL will then start in mid-August and run through to the 10th of September and we hope then very much that South Africa will follow immediately after that,” Grave said.
Grave however informed that “whether we can get a full tour in or whether we will have to look at a split tour between the Test and the T20s we don’t know we very much hope that South Africa will be able to come here in September for either a T20 only tour or a Test only tour at the very least,” owning to the uncertainty surrounding the Indian Premier League [IPL]”.
He pointed out that Cricket South Africa is committed to allowing their players, several of whom are in the Test squad to play in the IPL, thus posing logistical problems if there is a clash between the tour and the IPL.
Grave also related that “With no flights from South Africa and the UK which is the obvious routes to travel at the moment it’s not something South Africa have been able to confirm to us but are talking to them regularly and we hope for good news soon.”
With the future of cricket seeming to transition into a new form due to the regulations made on the heels of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Grave vested his trust in the medical staff of CWI and their experience from uniting with the England Cricket Board [ECB] for the ongoing tour of England.
“I think in the first instance we do have the expertise in our Medical panel and our Chief Medical Officer and our Sports Arts and medicine manager have been working flat out since almost the back end of April with the ECB on the bio-secure plans and now all of them are working closely with the CPL to ensure that can go ahead safely,” he added.
Meanwhile, the CEO confirmed that CWI is looking at hosting the tour in one country as to mitigate some of the logistical problems associated with flying and inter-territory regulations.
“We are certainly looking to one country to host South Africa in and that will go some way to mitigate the challenges you would face if we were looking at hosting a tour over multiple countries…I think moving does create … challenges in terms of Bio-security but also in terms of ensuring that all the measures we want to put in place can be put in place and be adhered to and obviously changing countries involves different procedures and measures in terms of ministries of Health and national securities so a huge operational challenge if we have to have long tours that need multiple venues and therefore cannot be hosted in one country,” Graves indicated.
While not confirming Barbados as the host, Grave revealed that there is a strong case presented for the island to host the series.
“Barbados is a compelling option for us obviously because they’ve got two first class grounds, three W’s at Cave Hill and Kensington obviously, the fact that will there be, we believe any way there will be flights coming in from London to Bridgetown and obviously the medical facilities in Barbados are some of the best in the region so I think Barbados would be one of the options if not the standout option for us on the basis that after so much cricket in Trinidad, the pitches in the facilities of Queen’s Park and Brian Lara would be under considerable pressure…at this stage we haven’t gotten there, we need to speak to the BCA [Barbados Cricket Association] and the Barbados government before we could make real decisions as to where South Africa could be hosted,” he said.
