While the world is battling against the novel COVID-19 or coronavirus, the 33-year-old Australian opening batsman David Warner feels that the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2020 is not possible to be organised.
Australia will host the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2020 from 18th October to 15th November 2020. While in last February-March the country successfully hosted the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2020 in front of the record-breaking crowd, there was no doubt about the success of the upcoming men’s T20 World Cup. But the coronavirus pandemic has forced to postpone many cricket matches and opened up an uncertain future of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2020.
The International Cricket Council (ICC) is still hopeful about this upcoming T20 World Cup. However, David Warner has a different feeling as he believes that it will be difficult to organise this tournament with 16 participating teams while the pandemic is still dominating.
Warner recently told during an Instagram live session with the Indian cricketer Rohit Sharma, “The ICC World Cup will not go ahead here by the looks of it. It will be difficult to get everyone (16 teams) together.”
It was a bizarre experience: David Warner about his experience to play an international match in an empty stadium
The ICC is trying hard to organising the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2020 on time in empty stadiums. Before the cricket matches have been postponed due to the ongoing pandemic, Australia and New Zealand played an ODI at Sydney in the empty stadium, where Warner also participated. Talking about that experience, David Warner claimed it was bizarre which they generally feel in the warm-up matches.
David Warner said, “It was a bizarre experience. You could only hear echo of cricket ball. It was bizarre. We are used to calling ‘yes and no’ while running between wickets but we did not need to do that. It was literally like playing a warm-up game. It was surreal. I don’t know for how long you can sustain that. You gain your momentum from home crowd.”
The ICC is also setting up the other plans in the case of postponement of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2020. According to the media reports, if the tournament gets postponed, the tourney can be shifted in early 2021 or any time of 2022. India also has the plan to host the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021 in October-November 2021.