With the IPL 2020 beginning in 10 days, all franchises are geared up to start their season with a high. All the players are in UAE in a biosecure environment and following all the protocols laid down by BCCI. Players from Australia and England are on a tour in England and will join their squads directly from there.
The main question was if the players have to go through a 6-day quarantine which is a BCCI protocol then they will not be available for the first few games. All 7 franchises apart from Mumbai Indians have players that are with the national side in England.
Players from England and Australia coming for Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020 will be available for selection for the Kolkata Knight Riders’ first game, Venky Mysore, team’s CEO said. According to KKR CEO, England and Australia players would not have to undergo the IPL’s mandatory six-day quarantine given they are travelling from one bio-secure bubble into another.
KKR, team based in Abu Dhabi, players need to quarantine for six days under local government rules but even by that timeframe, they should be available for side’s first match on September 23. The players will all be flown into the UAE on September 17 – a day after the England-Australia series ends – on a chartered flight. “While they are still negotiating with the authorities, we are reconciled to the fact that we may have to quarantine our three players,” Mysore said.
“They arrive on September 17, but our first game is on September 23, by which time they would’ve finished their [concessional six-day] quarantine. So it’s worked out well, and it’s good for the tournament,” he added. “What if we brought them on a sanitised charter flight and we took care of all the elements of immigration, testing, contactless stuff and everything to allow them to come right into a bubble here?’ To give credit to IPL, they took it very constructively and they have a written Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for that, which says if you’re coming from a bubble to another bubble, you don’t need the mandatory quarantine period,” he said. IPL 2020 is all set to begin in 10 days with the opener between the last year finalists Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings.
