Cricket Australia Set to Get Pre-Season Underway Later This Month Under New Rules: Report

Cricket Australia will reportedly begin their pre-season by May end with strict protocols for the safety of players amid coronavirus crisis.

While cricket isn’t a contact sport like football or rugby, certain rules including ban on bodily fluids to shine the ball have been put in place. The players will train under the watchful eyes of CA’s chief medical officer Dr John Orchard and head of sports medicine Alex Kountouris.

However, Kountouris doesn’t think there will be drastic change in how teams train.

“There’s physical distancing in the nets – there’s two or three bowlers in each net. One bowls at a time, the batter is 22 yards away so it’s not a big problem,” Kountouris was quoted as saying by The Sydney Morning Herald. “We don’t see it as too big a problem to manage, but these are the things we’re spelling out,. This is what you should do: keep your distance, how you should handle the ball, these are things easy to manage.”

He does reckon that certain habits including team huddles and celebrations as part of social distancing norms.

“You might not see high-fiving after a wicket or people ruffling someone else’s hair,” Kountouris said. “It will be a spaced huddle. It will be the new norm. That’s one of those things, the physical distancing for the time being, that will definitely be out until a vaccine or some sort of solution like that [comes up].

Onus though will fall on team to follow these rules and come out with different ways.

“I think we’ll have to find a different way to celebrate, they’ll have to be innovative. There are things you won’t be able to chop out overnight but people will gradually get used to doing things differently,” he said.