England, Australia players will be available for KKR in the first game: Venky Mysore
KKR CEO Venky Mysore has announced that the England and Australian Cricketers in the KKR squad will be available for their first game against the Mumbai Indians on the 23rd of September. The reason behind them being available, said Mysore, was that the franchise had negotiated with the authorities and have received the approval of reducing the quarantine period of both players down to 6 days.
Mysore told ESPNCricinfo, “While they are still negotiating with the authorities, we are reconciled to the fact that we may have to quarantine our three players. They arrive on September 17, but our first game is on September 23, by which time they would’ve finished their (six-day) quarantine. So it’s worked out well, and it’s good for the tournament.”
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England captain Eoin Morgan, opening batsman Tom Banton and Australian pacer Pat Cummins, who was snapped up for a mind-boggling 15.5 crores in the IPL auction, are the players from both nations among the KKR squad members. Currently, the trio is in action in the 3-match ODI series between the two countries.
Mysore added that players arriving in the IPL ‘bubble’ from another bio-secure cover, such as the England and Australia ODI series or the Caribbean Premier League (CPL), will not be expected to undergo the tournament-mandated quarantine.
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“What we did was put a plan together and shared it with the medical team at the IPL,” he said. “We told them, ‘they’re in a bio-secure bubble in the UK. What if we brought them on a sanitized charter flight and we took care of all the elements of immigration, testing, contactless stuff, and everything to allow them to come right into a bubble here?’
“To give credit to IPL, they took it very constructively and they have a written Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for that, which says if you’re coming from a bubble to another bubble, you don’t need the mandatory quarantine period,” he added.