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HomeAustraliaCricket Victoria reconsidering early-season plans as state suffers sharp COVID-19 rise

Cricket Victoria reconsidering early-season plans as state suffers sharp COVID-19 rise

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Last Updated on 5 years by Charbel Coorey

As Melbourne returned to lockdown due to a spike in COVID-19 numbers, Cricket Victoria is reconsidering its plans to start the domestic season.

The news comes as Victoria has had a triple-figure rise in cases for the fifth consecutive day, with cases crossing 1,000 in the state for the first time since the pandemic began. The biggest jump was in the last 24 hours, with 288 confirmed cases. Along with Melbourne, Mitchell Shire is also under lockdown with fresh border restrictions in place.

Shaun Graf, who is Cricket Victoria’s general manager of cricket, spoke about the situation in an interview with SEN Radio. “I’m just doing some pre-planning as to how it could look if we were forced to quarantine or get an exemption to be able to quarantine in one of the northern states or across the west,” said Graf.

“If we had to quarantine and these [Marsh Cup] games are later in September, we’d be looking to have to get out of here if we were able to early September, hopefully, get exemptions across the other states and play away from home. That’s one the scenarios I’m looking at, hence I’m looking at we could be away for anything up to two months.”

Cricket Victoria reconsidering early-season plans as Melbourne suffers sharp COVID-19 rise | Melbourne returned to lockdown due to spike in Covid-19 numbers
Cricket Victoria is currently assessing its options after Melbourne goes into lockdown.

Graf believed that cricket wouldn’t be as affected as other sports as the players are familiar with travelling. 

“We’ve spoken to players, it’s not quite the same as for football codes because we are used to travelling and being on the road a long period of time but everyone needs to know that this may be a scenario if we are to kick the season off. We’d have to make sure players stay within the compound of hotels, that’s something we’d need to look at because you haven’t got the freedom to go for a run or have a hit of gold so we’d have to look at those issues that footy has confronted. But generally from a travelling point of view it doesn’t really faze a cricket side as much as the football codes,” he added.

He also said that the six players who have taken the COVID-19 test have all been tested negative. As of now, the Victoria men’s and women’s camps are on despite the lockdown.

Written by Sarthak Karkhanis. Follow Sarthak on Twitter today.

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Sarthak Karkhanis
Sarthak Karkhanis
Sarthak is a well-established cricket writer and video producer. In addition to writing for CricBlog, Sarthak has worked with Star Sports, ESPNcricinfo, The Quint, and Hotstar.

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