Cricket West Indies’ (CWI) Chief Executive Officer, Johnny Grave is anticipating a return to some amount of normalcy when the Caribbean unit tours New Zealand soon.
The three T20Is and two-Test series will still see the maroon guys going through a 14-day quarantine period but according to Grave, it is expected that things will go back to the way it was in a pre-COVID-19 world.
“We will have to go through a 14-day quarantine and hopefully as a team we can play in front of crowds in New Zealand and the players wouldn’t be in bio-secure venues and be able to tour New Zealand as they would have been expected to in New Zealand,” Grave stated while appearing on the Mason and Guest radio programme recently.
Logistically, Grave revealed that preparations are in place to have the players in the play-off stages of the Indian Premier League fly directly from Dubai to New Zealand.
Of the players coming from the IPL Grave said, “Unfortunately the first available flight is on the Thursday after the final on Tuesday so they would create their own quarantine bubble for 14 days so they would train separately from the rest of the touring party and would get out of quarantine just ahead of the T20 internationals.”
Meanwhile, for the rest of the touring party, they will convene in Barbados before winging out to London and then to Dubai to pick up the IPL players whose franchise did not make it to the play-offs.
The CEO revealed that he is also hopeful that they will be able to fly commercially and will be able to train during the quarantine period so as to get a month’s head start in preparation before the series.
Once in Auckland, Grave indicated that the team will be housed at the University in Lincoln.
Former Sri Lanka all-rounder Russel Arnold, who is in Australia also featured on the programme and highlighted that New Zealand has got a handle on the world-wide pandemic.
“New Zealand has looked after themselves very well, they have had their rugby season going right through and they have had crowds right through so community transmission has hardly happened and since it’s an island so they have been able to block their boarders so I am pretty sure when West Indies go out there they will have a great time and New Zealand has just announced their summer with Australia and Bangladesh coming in,” Arnold stated.
New Zealand recorded one new case yesterday bringing their current active cases to 41 with 33 imported cases in Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facilities while eight are community cases. The country has recorded 1493 cases of the virus.
