LPL deferred to November:
After the government of Sri Lanka declared that any person arriving on Sri Lanka for the league would need to be undergone a 140days quarantine period, the Lanka Premier League (LPL) has been deferred until minimum mid-November. With only a few days left to start the LPL, and now with this 14-days quarantine period represent massive expenses for the LPL organizers, which enforced Sri Lanka Cricket to rethink the timing of the league.
The Sri Lanka Cricket Board was hopeful the health ministry would give permission for a shorter duration of the quarantine period for the cricketers, broadcast crew members, commentators, and organizers, but with a lot of new arrivals coming from different countries dealing with COVID-19 issues, the health officials of the government had not approved.
Ravin Wickramaratne, the vice president of SLC said that “We are not the health experts. That’s why we need to obey the instructions of the health ministry. There is a window from 20th November to 12th December, and we are planning for that schedule. It was not right to postpone the league for many weeks, as then it would overlap with the planned dates for the IPL, which the LPL is not able to give competition in terms of interest of viewers.”
Till now, Sri Lanka has successfully contained the spreading of virus and recorded fewer numbers of official demises than New Zealand. But that can possible because of the strict quarantine rules, which may hurt the chances of international cricket returning in Sri Lanka in the month of October.
For conducting a Test series, Bangladesh is due to tour in that month, even BCB is asking to send a development team, which means that there is a probability of 60 arrivals from Bangladesh. As per Wickramaratne, in case all those 60 members are needed to undergo 14 days quarantine period, even that tour seems less possible.
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