IPL 2020 | England and Australia players will be available for KKR’s opening game, confirms Venky Mysore
Venky Mysore gave an update on the foreign stars in IPL
|While the quarantine rule in UAE has created confusion, KKR CEO Venky Mysore has confirmed that the English and Australian players will be ready for his side's opening fixture. Mysore stated that the negotiations with Abu Dhabi authorities are ongoing to bypass quarantines for the ENG/AUS players.
With just eight days left for the start of IPL 2020, there is still a growing uncertainty over the participation of the English and Australian players during the first week of the tournament, owing to the bio-secure bubble and its restriction. England’s three-match ODI series against Australia, scheduled to get over on September 16, poses trouble for the franchises.
However, KKR’s CEO Venky Mysore gave a crucial and much-needed update on the issue, confirming that the international players from the two countries would be ready for KKR’s opening fixture on September 23. The franchise has three representatives from England and Australia - Tom Banton, Eoin Morgan and Pat Cummins, who will all have a key role to play in KKR's set-up.
"While they are still negotiating with the authorities, we are reconciled to the fact that we may have to quarantine our three players. 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," Mysore told ESPNcricinfo.
The same, Mysore confirmed, would also apply to people coming in from bio-secure bubble in the West Indies, where the players were part of the CPL action. The bubble-to-bubble transfer of players seems to be the argument being used by the franchises to skip mandatory quarantines for cricketers flying in from both the CPL and the England-Australia series.
"We told them, 'they're in a bio-secure bubble in UK. 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 added.
"We're bringing all our players on a charter straight to Abu Dhabi. Even smallest of detail like how they will go from hotel to airport - they go in a bus with driver who is part of the bubble - straight to the tarmac. That is the level of detailing we have gone into, because of which they have waived the quarantine period."
