By Daniel Brettig
Alyssa Healy believes Australian players should get Australian government reassurance of safety in the Indian Premier League before they choose to return to the Twenty20 tournament, which has announced it will resume this weekend.
The competition’s final 16 games will start on Saturday with the final now not due to be played until June 3, more than a week later than originally scheduled, following the announcement of a ceasefire between nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan.
That means it will start to clash with international cricket, and drastically shorten Australia’s preparation time for the world Test championship final, currently scheduled to begin on June 11 against South Africa at Lord’s.
Six venues will be used, all in central and southern India, some distance from the border with Pakistan.
A number of Australians are involved as players, coaching staff and commentators and most have left India, returning home over the weekend.
Australian players, who have been reassured by Cricket Australia that the governing body will defend their right to choose in the event of pressure from the Indian board and IPL clubs, must now decide whether to return to the event or not.
Delhi Capitals’ Mitchell Starc celebrates a wicket.Credit: nnadamien.mccartney
The IPL still has 13 group matches left, including the fixture between Ricky Ponting’s Punjab Kings and Mitch Starc’s Delhi Capitals, which was called off during in the first innings on May 8 as air-raid sirens wailed nearby.
Australian women’s captain Healy, who was in Dharamsala with her husband Starc when the game was abruptly abandoned, said players had been concerned by the amount of disinformation they encountered in India.
The Australian government’s current travel advice for India is to “exercise a high degree of caution” if travelling there.
“There was a lot of anxiety around the Australian group because we didn’t have a whole heap of information as to what was going on,” Healy told the Willow Talk podcast.
“That’s probably been the really interesting and probably the scariest part of this whole situation is the misinformation. Quite close to what’s being fought over, but we were assured everything was fine, ‘everything is OK. It’s miles away, the game will go ahead and everything will be fine.’
“At the end of the day they evacuated the stadium as a precaution, which was fine, but it was probably a little bit too close for comfort.”
Healy spoke about how she and other families and staff were sitting in the stands when the light towers started to go out in the middle of Delhi’s clash with Punjab.
“It was a surreal experience,” Healy said. “All of a sudden a couple of the light towers went out and we were just sitting there up the top waiting … we’re a large group of family and extra support staff and the next minute the guy who wrangles the group of us and gets us on the bus came up and his face was white. He was like, ‘we need to go right now’.
“Then [another] guy came out and his face was white and he grabbed one of the children and said, ‘we need to leave right now’. We were like, ‘what’s going on?’ We weren’t told anything. We had no idea. Next minute we are down being shuffled into this room which was like a holding pen. All the boys were in there.
“Faf [du Plessis] didn’t even have shoes on. We were all just waiting there looking stressed. I said to Mitch, ‘what’s going on?’ He said the town 60 kilometres away had just been smacked by some of the missiles so there was a complete blackout in the area. That’s why the lights were off because the Dharamsala stadium was like a beacon at that point in time. All of a sudden we’re crammed into vans and off we go back to the hotel. There was madness.”
On their way out of Dharamsala, ultimately to Delhi and then home, Healy and Starc saw Indian preparations for war.
“We ended up going south-west towards the border which was a little bit terrifying,” Healy said.
“Mitch and I have played too much Call of Duty and we’re noticing all the SAM sites that were just sitting there ready to go. They’re radar-operated systems that shoot missiles at aircraft.”
The match that will resume the tournament will be played between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Kolkata Knight Riders on May 17 in Bengaluru.
Josh Hazlewood plays for RCB, but has been nursing a shoulder injury and missed their most recent match. He is expected to be fit for Lord’s.
Besides Hazlewood and Starc the other possible Australian WTC players in IPL teams are skipper Pat Cummins, Travis Head, Mitch Marsh and Josh Inglis.
Cummins and Head play for Sunrisers Hyderabad, who are out of play-off contention even though they have three matches remaining. But Inglis’ Punjab, Starc’s Delhi, and Marsh’s Lucknow Super Giants remain in the frame.
The Pakistan Super League, which includes David Warner among the participants, is also expected to announce a resumption imminently, though many of the overseas players are reported to be unlikely to return, in part due to other commitments.
India and Pakistan have clashed since India struck multiple locations in Pakistan that it said were “terrorist camps” in retaliation for the deadly attack in its troubled region of Kashmir last month, in which it said Islamabad was involved.
with AAP, agencies
