International Cricket Council (ICC) will use the postponement of Pakistan Super League (PSL) season six as a learning experience before conducting the men’s Twenty20 World Cup in India later this year.
Organising the mega event, which is scheduled to take place in October, will be a challenge for the governing body given the Covid-19 limitations.
“It is extremely important for everybody to realise that in the case of risk mitigation, it is not a linear curve,” ICC Chief Executive Manu Sawhney was quoted as saying on ESPNcricinfo.
“For example, given a series which is a bilateral series, let’s say between two teams, versus let’s say a World Cup, which has 16 teams coming from 16 different countries into one country, the risks associated with that are exponentially larger and way different.”
Earlier on Thursday, PSL was postponed indefinitely after a Covid-19 outbreak was reported in the bio-secure bubble of the tournament with multiple players testing positive for the coronavirus.
Sawhney said that PSL episode would definitely be used as one of the examples before finalising the protocols for the bio-secure environment in the T20 world cup.
He added that ICC will learn from what is happening in various T20 leagues, including the Indian Premier League (IPL). “IPL will be very key in terms of learning before we look at what are the protocols we’ll have to follow for the T20 [World Cup] later in the year,” Sawhney said.
While India is the front-runner to host the world cup in the shortest format this year, ICC has also kept United Arab Emirates as the back-up venue for the event.
