Australia won’t ditch handshakes, confirms Justin Langer

As the COVID 19 virus starts to spread across the globe, a new trend of avoiding handshakes, to evade physical contact, is on the rise and the field of cricket is no exception to it. Earlier, the England Cricket Board (ECB) confirmed that the World champions, England, will be doing away with handshakes on their Sri Lanka tour and would resort to fist bumps for greetings in the middle.

Addressing on the same issue, Australia coach Justin Langer joked that the Aussies will continue to shake hands on the field and reassured that the team indeed have an abundance of hand sanitizers in their kits.

"We'll keep shaking hands. I reckon there's plenty of hand sanitizer in the Australian kits. I'm sure we'll just keep shaking hands and move on from that," cricket.com.au quoted Langer as saying.

Coming off a horrific whitewash in South Africa, the Kangaroos gear up to face New Zealand for the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy at home. Langer believes that the boys are mentally strong and will overcome the rare shortcoming with grace.

"We know we've still got six more games to play and then they've got to go again. We've probably learned the lessons from that in the past as well when the guys are playing all three forms, and playing IPL, how we keep them really sharp," Langer said.

"We know how brilliant our cricketers are but even the best of the best, staying 100 percent sharp all the time, is really hard to do. They're mentally tough guys but it's a real challenge for us," he added.