Cricket may step out of bio-bubble, go the Premier League way

According to an ICC insider, a Premier League-type model, where there's no bubble, but all stakeholders get tested regularly is the likely way forward.

Cricket is set to move into a Premier League-type model, shunning the bubble, it is learnt. The bubble issues were discussed at the International Cricket Council’s Chief Executives Committee meeting on Friday and the members agreed that the bubble model wasn’t sustainable.

According to an ICC insider, a Premier League-type model, where there’s no bubble, but all stakeholders get tested regularly is the likely way forward. “In the Premier League, they don’t even send the close contacts to isolation. Only those who test positive, go into quarantine,” the source said.

Jose Mourinho, when he was Tottenham Hotspur manager, had cited an example that how he was scared about testing positive for being Matt Doherty’s contact, as the latter had contracted Covid. But Mourinho tested negative and was good to go.

Bubble life has been getting to the mental health of the players, especially for the teams with an overload of fixtures across formats. For example, the Indian team left for England on June 2 for the World Test Championship final and in the second week of September, after the postponement of the final Test at Old Trafford, the majority of the players went straight into the IPL bubble before moving to the T20 World Cup.

That such elongated bubble life is not sustainable was mentioned by India’s head coach Ravi Shastri after his team’s last match at the World Cup.

“When you’re six months in a bubble… there are a lot of players who play all three formats of the game. In the last 24 months, they’ve been home for 25 days. I don’t care who you are, if your name is Bradman, if you’re in a bubble as well, your average will come down because you’re human,” he had said, adding: “But sooner or later, the bubble will burst. So you’ve got to be careful.”

A year previously, England’s white-ball captain Eoin Morgan predicted about players opting out of tours/series due to the strain of bubble life. “We have spoken about this (issue) as a team and we have accepted that guys will come in and out of the bubble if they feel it is affecting their mental health,” Morgan had said during a charity event.

The ICC Members haven’t set a timeframe to change the model.

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