India big winners as cricket keeps show on road during COVID-19 disruptions

It is fast approaching two years since the coronavirus pandemic invaded and interrupted our lives. The impacts on professional cricket, with its dependency on long game times and international tournaments, have been obvious — tournaments cancelled, disrupted, or switched to different locations, positive testing of players, reduced attendances, restricted travel, cuts in revenues for organizers, bio-bubbles for players, and attendant mental health issues.

Has cricket dealt well with these impacts?

After the initial shock and lockdowns, administrators responded to the COVID-19 challenges — and the varying policies adopted by national governments — with what seems to have been a strategy that “the show must go on.”

There will be those who argue that they had little alternative. Failure to play the game at professional levels would lead to a loss of broadcasting revenues that would threaten the game’s existence at those levels.

This was certainly the strategy followed by the England and Wales Cricket Board. An early casualty of the pandemic was the ECB’s new tournament, The Hundred, due to launch in 2020 but delayed until 2021, and set to continue this year.

The ECB’s accounts for the year ending Jan. 31, 2021, reported a loss of $22.6 million (£16.7 million), compared with a profit of $9.1 million in the previous year. Overall income fell by 10 percent, but administrative costs rose by 16 percent. These were influenced by the setting up of bio-secure bubbles which allowed international cricket to proceed in summer 2020, with visits from the West Indies, Pakistan, Ireland, and Australia.

The willingness of these teams to participate came with some expectation of reciprocal behavior. This was particularly the case with