The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s lives across the globe. This virus has now forced the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to close the headquarter in Mumbai from Tuesday as well. However, they have asked the employees to continue their work from home. Notably, the cricketing options have already been suspended until further notice.
“The BCCI employees were today notified that the headquarters at the Wankhede Stadium will be as good as closed in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. All the staffers have been advised to work from home,” a source from the BCCI shared to the PTI on the condition of anonymity.
“However, if someone still wants to come, they can.”
The coronavirus has not only affected people’s lives but also sporting events around the globe which included the much-awaited Indian Premier League. Last Friday, the BCCI has pushed back the start date of the IPL 2020 from March 29 to April 15 while postponed all other domestic tournaments, including the Irani Cup and the Women’s Challenger Trophy and other scheduled to take place now.
India has so far registered 114 positive cases with the death count of two as well. The global death count has crossed 6,000 and the number of infected people is more than 160,000 across the globe due to the novel coronavirus. Not only in India but also around the globe, many of the companies asked their employees to work from home in these tough times and the BCCI too followed the same way.
Along with this, National Cricket Academy (NCA) has also stopped their zonal camps even though rehabilitation programmes at the Bengaluru centre was still going on as on Monday. The IPL franchises met to discuss the upcoming IPL in a conference call in Mumbai where they discussed all the possible options as well after their meeting with the BCCI in Mumbai on Saturday.
As the IPL already losing 17 days, BCCI president Sourav Ganguly has given the hint that one of the options could be a “truncated IPL”, but only if the situation gets better by April 15. In case of a truncated IPL, it can be seen that eight teams will be divided into two groups with the top four teams will go into the knockouts too.
