While the Indian and Sri Lankan camp are divided on the on Delhi’s pollution, Nirmalan Dhanabalasingham, Sri Lanka’s physiotherapist, has warned of consequences of playing in the hazardous conditions.
The session after the lunch on day two was marred by delays due to Sri Lankan players’ issue with the polluted air. Several visiting players came out to field wearing a pollution mask, and they were looking primed to discontinue after some of their players were struggling to remain on the field. However, the Indian players did not complain about the air and were looking comfortable while batting.
India also had to pay a big price for the start-stop period of play as Virat Kohli fell for his career-best score of 243 while Ravichandran Ashwin also fell off the very first ball following a break. In fact, the scenes were so chaotic that head coaches of both the teams had to walk out on the field to talk to the on-field umpires.A furious Virat Kohli eventually declared the innings on 537 for 6. The Indian fielders didn’t need masks for the rest of the day and surprisingly neither did the Sri Lankan batsmen.
Not only the players, but the coaches also looked divided on the matter. Sri Lanka’s stand-in coach Nic Pothas and India’s bowling coach Bharat Arun contradicted each other on the issue in the post-day conference. However, the Sri Lankan physiotherapist has insisted that the players were struggling in the polluted air and also questioned the decision to continue with the game.
“There were a few players with respiratory distress in terms of like struggling to take deep breaths and we had a couple of guys who had to come off the field to be nebulised and open their airways up. Some actually vomited because what I think is the toxicity of the pollution they weren’t able to deal with it,” Dhanabalasingham told Cricbuzz.
“The advice given by the doctors here at the ground was there was no long-term effects caused by it. My question was always that’s for someone resting, but not playing in an elite sport and having to perform under pressure with this increased stress on their respiratory system,” he added.
Speaking on the effects of playing in those conditions, Dhanabalasingham said an individual could get infected.
“You can get infections from it because these particles in the air get caught and would not be removed from the systems. You can have a higher incidence of things like upper respiratory tract infection, more running nose and throat symptoms. We just have to be smart and give our guys the best possible advice to minimize the risk because they have already been exposed,” he explained.
“It would affect as you increase your physical activity as you are now placing higher stress on the systems where it has a greater requirement of your body to process the air that’s coming in and replenish the body of oxygen. Therefore if it is already difficult and then you have to perform physical exercise at the same time that stresses the body even further,” he added.
The physio also opined that the game should introduce minimum health standards to avoid a similar incident:
“Going forward, there is some way of measuring it (pollution) so that we know in the future whether it is safe or not safe for someone to come off. For this particular Test match, we are almost stuck where our guys have to obviously go off in kinds of conditions if it is similar tomorrow. I don’t know where they draw the line,” he said.
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