Sports
Bio-bubble fatigue forces some overseas players to opt out of IPL-14
by S Venkat Narayan,
Our Special Correspondent
NEW DELHI, April 3:
The months-long bubble life is beginning to take its toll as international players have started to drop out of the world’s richest cricket Indian Premier League’s (IPL) 14th edition citing bubble fatigue.
Fast bowler Mark Wood, who has spent many weeks, on and off, in bio-bubbles with the English team since July last year, was the first to withdraw, hours before the auction in February. Then, a couple of weeks back, Australian wicket-keeper batsman Joshua Philippe informed his franchise Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) that he is not coming. Now, two more Australian cricketers, Mitchell Marsh and Josh Hazlewood, have made themselves unavailable, hours before their flight to India.
The IPL begins on April 9 and concludes on May 30. The tournament will be staged, without spectators, in six bio-secure bubbles even as India is in the grip of an intense second wave of the pandemic.
All the players who have opted out have spoken of the challenge of playing while under the constant restrictions of quarantines and bio-bubbles, often away from their families for long stretches at a time. The IPL requires all stakeholders to undergo a week of hard quarantine before entering the bubble.
“It’s been a long 10 months in bubbles and quarantine at different times. So, I decided to have a rest from cricket and spend some time at home and in Australia in the next two months,” Chennai Super Kings’ (CSK) seamer Hazlewood told cricket.com.au on Thursday. “That’s the decision I’ve made and it sits pretty well with me.”
The Australian internationals have been living the bubble life since July last year, competing in England, then the UAE IPL, followed by the international bubble at home against India. Hazlewood said he has prioritized international cricket, with this being a T20 World Cup and an Ashes year. He could now be seen playing at the back end of the domestic season for New South Wales.
On Wednesday, Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) declared that all-rounder Marsh had “opted out due to personal reasons”. Marsh had to pull out of the last IPL in SRH’s season opener itself due to an ankle injury. After recovery, he played in the Big Bash league as well as the T20I’s against New Zealand. Philippe, who is a white ball specialist, competed in the same competitions post-IPL as Marsh.
Although the franchises have been left to look for last minute replacements, they have been publicly supportive of the players’ decisions. “The RCB management is disappointed to lose a player of Josh’s calibre for this IPL season. But, at the same time, we fully understand, respect and support his decision of excluding himself from the tournament,” the franchise said in a statement.
RCB found a like-for-like replacement for Philippe in New Zealand’s Finn Allen. SRH have replaced Marsh with England’s prolific opener Jason Roy, although their top order resources are many with Jonny Bairstow, David Warner and Kane Williamson in the squad.
With the IPL being the most lucrative tournament in cricket, the predicament before the players is real.
“It’s life-changing money which is why it was such a difficult decision for me,” Wood said. One of the fastest bowlers in the world right now—he regularly bowls at 150kph—Wood is a much sought-after player. “I didn’t want to go into the auction and then let a team down at a later date. I didn’t think that was fair,” he said.
As many as 12 of Wood’s English teammates are competing in the IPL this year. England Cricket Board’s acceptance of IPL as a part of the cricket calendar is as much about the quality of the league as it is about the money on offer.
“We don’t particularly want to go toe-to-toe with our players over IPL participation in the long run because we may face losing some of our best players,” Ashley Giles, ECB director of cricket said in a BBC talk show. “I don’t want that to be a kiss of death. I think we have to understand that it could be a danger in the future.”
England’s rotation policy for their all-format players, which came in for criticism for not fielding their best Test team against India, was devised with the seven-week long IPL in mind.
No Indian player has withdrawn from IPL-14. But captain Virat Kohli also spoke about the workload and bubble fatigue recently.
“Scheduling needs to be looked at in the future, because playing in ‘bubbles’ for so long is going to be very, very difficult going forward,” he said after the conclusion of the two-month-long home series against England. “You can’t expect everyone to be at the same level of mental strength. Sometimes, you do get cooked.”
Indian players have been competing in bubbles starting with the UAE IPL last September. Since then, there was a long tour to Australia and a lengthy home series against England. There is non-stop cricket ahead too, with the WTC final following the IPL, a five-Test series in England, and more home matches before the T20 World Cup this October.
While BCCI officials say the players are permitted to opt-out, unlike England there is no planned rotation policy in place.
As Sri Lanka were tanking their must-win Super Eights match of the men’s T20 World Cup 2026 at Khettarama, fans in a packed Khettarama stadium began ironically chanting for New Zealand.
Irony tends to come naturally to Sri Lanka fans, like sarcasm, and self-deprecation, as well as supporting other teams now, because for 12 years no senior national side from Sri Lanka has made a global tournament final, and if you like watching cricket you have no choice but to find another outlet for your hopes. “I’m happy, obviously,” said one woman leaving Khettarama when she was asked how she felt after Sri Lanka’s humbling at the hands of New Zealand. “Why, I’m a New Zealand supporter, no?” She and her group were decked out in Sri Lanka gear and she was speaking entirely in Sinhala. She laughed as she slipped out of frame.
Sri Lanka fans could switch off cricket entirely. This would be the rational choice. And yet they are helplessly, addictedly, devoted.
Other sports, bless them, have tried to break through on the island. As a spectator experience, Premier League football has infiltrated the urban English-speaking classes, but on the playing front Sri Lanka’s own football remains as modestly-supported as it has always been. Rugby – always popular among Sri Lanka’s wealthy – had a flutter in the 21st century, when it was patronised by the once-powerful Rajapaksa political dynasty. But its fandom mostly remains locked in the higher echelons of Sri Lankan society.
On almost any journey through Sri Lanka, you are likely to find 50 softball cricket games to every tap-rugby or football match. You’ll find kids who can mimic Jasprit Bumrah’s action, but don’t so much as know who Cristiano Ronaldo or Richie McCaw is. Cricket is, without question, the game of Sri Lanka’s masses.
Through the course of the three successive Sri Lanka defeats that saw them crash out of the World Cup, many Sri Lanka fans claimed to television news reporters that they will never spend money to come to another match as they angrily left stadiums. Social media was rife with disavowals of Sri Lankan cricket.
But we have the long-view data on Lankan fans. Whenever the men start to win, the stadiums pack out. When in 2024, the women made a charge to the Asia Cup final, a raucous full house exulted in Dambulla when they won. In this tournament, a single win over Australia was enough for Sri Lanka fans to buy out all three of their Super Eight fixtures.
Where West Indies’ decline in the longer formats has partially been put down to the infiltration of American sports in the Caribbean, Sri Lanka’s public loves cricket to such an extent that it has shown no serious ambition to develop an alternative passion. Their problem is there is no way to turn their anger at the national teams’ failures into change at the administrative level. They have no means through which to hold this system accountable.
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Sri Lankan cricket’s financial reality is that on a global scale, a country of 22 million (the population is possibly shrinking) barely registers in comparison to its neighbours’ economic heft. This is especially true in the last few years, when Sri Lanka has run into cataclysmic economic trouble, the 2022 meldtown depressing advertising revenues for years.
But geographically the island sits in the most-profitable time zone for cricket. Broadcasters know that even if the Sri Lankan market is limited, they can sell ads from Sri Lanka matches in Indian prime time, where revenue streams are strong. Sri Lanka’s cricket board has been awake to this shift in the past dozen years, and now understands that it is foreign viewership that generates the majority of its income. This is partly why, over the last several years, Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) has leapt into the lap of the BCCI, when as recently as 2014, SLC had been a dissenter to the Big Three programme at the ICC. Looking after the home market is useful, if only to maintain the perception of cricketing health to a global audience. But it is the neighbour who looks after the bottom lines.
This dynamic lets SLC treat Sri Lankan cricket with surprising disdain. Take their extraordinary suspension from the ICC in late 2023, for instance. Soon after Sri Lanka’s men crashed out of the 2023 World Cup, SLC president Shammi Silva had asked for his own board to be temporarily be cast out by the ICC due to political intereference, in order to win a domestic battle against then sports minister Roshan Ranasinghe. Silva never admitted that he himself had asked for the suspension, but he never denied it either, joking only that if his powers of diplomacy were so impressive, he deserves a higher position than just Sri Lanka cricket’s head honcho.
That this move cost Sri Lanka hosting rights to the Under 19 Men’s World Cup in early 2024 caused little distress at the board, but did create problems for Sri Lanka’s Under-19 cricketers, who had trained for months for a home World Cup, only to have to eventually travel to South Africa for the event. The Sri Lankan spectators that may have turned up to this World Cup were barely an afterthought. Local businesses also had potential revenue whisked away. But in having the sports minister sacked through the course of all this high-level hijinx, SLC achieved its major objective, however.
There is also the Lanka Premier League (LPL) in which, incredibly, home audiences have also been an afterthought. What is supposed to be SLC’s flagship T20 product has been little more than franchise-owner roulette, owners almost uniformly uninterested in sticking around for more than a couple of seasons, and even less bothered with developing local fanbases, as any number of IPL, or PSL teams have done.
In the first season of the LPL, Jaffna Stallions had begun to engage fans in the northern city which for decades had been cut off from Sri Lankan cricket by war. By the beginning of the next season, Stallions – who had won the first tournament – had been tossed out by SLC largely for business reasons with a higher bidder poised to come in. The Dambulla franchise has been Dambulla Viiking one year, Dambulla Giants the next, Dambulla Aura for two years, then rebranded as Dambulla Thunders until one of its potential owners was arrested under Sri Lanka’s sports corruption law, and then Dambulla Sixers the last time the LPL was played.
Building a tournament brand season-on-season, ensuring a high level of competition through which players may hone skills, attracting quality overseas talent both on the coaching and playing fronts – these are all secondary and tertiary considerations to picking up the next franchise cheque. This tournament has now not been played since July 2024, SLC’s official reason for cancelling it in 2025 having been the unavailability of grounds, which were getting upgrades ahead of this T20 World Cup. Even by SLC’s own logic this is an admission of dizzying incompetence. SLC had known it was hosting this World Cup years ago. On top of which, canceling the nation’s top men’s T20 competition precisely in the same season the team is due to compete in a home World Cup is almost glorious in its stupidity.
In fact, stadium upgrades were not the real reason for the LPL’s cancellation – grounds at Khettarama and Pallekele did not require substantial overhauls, and venues in Dambulla and Hambantota (which were not used in this T20 World Cup, but have both hosted LPL games in the past), were unused in any case. The real reason for its cancellation is perhaps more embarrassing: the tournament’s brand had become so toxic, that it was struggling to attract even the substandard franchisees it had previously drawn. No firm dates have been announced for a 2026 LPL.
SLC has also crowed about its financial health over the past several years, publishing audited accounts while holding press conferences to advertise its solvency. And yet the men’s Test team has only four matches on its schedule this year. The women’s team (who while the men have crashed out of the World Cup, have just won a bilateral series in the Caribbean), had also seen their schedule obliterated during the Covid-19 years, Sri Lanka’s one remaining superstar cricketer – Chamari Athtapaththu – losing 24 prime run-making months from her career.
In the 12 years since a senior Sri Lanka team last reached the knockouts of an ICC final (the men didn’t even qualify for last year’s Champions Trophy), there has been significant turnover in coaching personnel – Marvan Atapattu, Graham Ford, Chandika Hathurusingha, Mickey Arhtur, Chris Silverwood, and now Sanath Jayasuriya now all having failed in various attempts to return the men’s side to a modicum of its former glory. In that stretch, Sri Lanka has had at least 10 T20I captains, ranging from Lasith Malinga, to Charith Asalanka, to Angelo Mathews, to Kusal Mendis. Selectors, like players, have been tried and discarded.
At the highest levels of the board, Silva is currently serving his fourth consecutive term as president of SLC, having been voted in uncontested yet again by a compliant body of members. The board’s key positions continue to be filled by Silva loyalists, while CEO Ashley de Silva has been in situ for more than a decade.
Among the public, the Sri Lankan board has long been among the most reviled public-facing institutions in the country, a consensus having developed that SLC is little more than a den of sycophants and profiteers, and that only root-and-stem removal will bring lasting positive change. But why should their ire matter to the board? Even on the financial front, the local cricket supporter is increasingly irrelevant to Sri Lanka’s cricketing governance.
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“No matter how we as cricketers try to stay positive, there is negativity outside” said Sri Lanka captain Dasun Shanaka, after his team collapsed against New Zealand and became the first Super Eight team to be eliminated from the T20 World Cup. “That’s a big loss for Sri Lankan cricket. This is the only sport we have, and I don’t know if we’ll be able to protect it. If you look outside the stadium, you’ll see how many people are standing outside with mics, and people will say stuff without having watched the match.”
Having complained about how fans were treating the team, he went on to make a suggestion that was astoundingly tone-deaf: “We will play and leave, but if for the players who will come in the future, if the government can even stop it [the negativity] that’s better for their mental health.”
Shanaka is merely the latest log to be fed into the woodchipper of Sri Lankan cricket, so perhaps his comments do not deserve to be taken especially seriously, particularly as Sri Lanka cricketers face significantly fewer challenges in their day-to-day lives than do cricketers elsewhere in South Asia, and the media environment is not especially malicious by global standards. But the comments do reveal something else: so long has the men’s team been in decline, that some players have begun to develop loathing towards their own supporters.
Supporters, meanwhile, have also begun to clock that top cricketers’ lifestyles – often as advertised on social media – are out of step with their achievements for the national side. Comments sections bear this out. A classic top comment on a player’s post about the restaurant he visited, or a watch he has just bought might go, in Sinhala lokka, velaavak thibunoth vitharak cricketuth poddak gahanna. Essentially: “boss if you have some time between all this, please also play some cricket”. Irony, as mentioned up top, comes naturally.
It might be simpler for all parties if they merely refused to show up to these matches. Players will still earn their salaries and match fees, the source of these monies now increasingly foreign, particularly if they play in the leagues. SLC can continue to strike lucrative deals without having to contend with the island’s own hurting audiences.
And still, kids still race home from school to play cricket at the local ground with their friends, parents around the island still load up kit-bags into trishaws to take kids to training, and the moment either the men’s or women’s team shows even a glimmer of promise, the nation finds itself hopelessly gripped.
They will likely turn up to Pallekele for their final match of the World Cup, having bought out the fixture soon after Sri Lanka qualified for the Super Eight. What will they do there? Hate-watch? This particular fanbase-board-cricketer dynamic is perhaps unlike anything else in the cricketing world, and in the past Pallekele crowds have not been shy to make their displeasure felt. We are in uncharted territory on this one.
Whatever happens on Saturday, both players and board will fear the crowd’s ire, because for one more night at least, the world’s eyes are here. The players will have to show up of course, but Silva, the SLC president, may not ask to be shown on television and talked about, as he often does when the team is winning. Through their unyielding affection for the game, Sri Lanka’s fans have become a thorn in the establishment’s side.
[Cricinfo]
[Cricbuzz]
Pakistan’s habitual desperate net-run-rate calculations towards the tail-end of a group stage have thrown up another classic. In what is a dead-rubber for already-eliminated hosts Sri Lanka, Pakistan have been given a faint shot at staying alive in the T20 World Cup, thanks to a surprise comeback win for England over New Zealand. New Zealand boast a vastly superior net run rate (1.390) to Pakistan’s (-0.461), so for Salman Agha’s men to progress to the semi-finals, they must win today [Saturday] by around 64 runs, or chase any Sri Lankan target in about 13.1 overs. Those, for Pakistan, are the only numbers that matter in Pallekele.
That should, in theory, change the somewhat conservative approach they have taken through the middle overs. Frankly put, Babar Azam’s place in this T20I set-up was getting hard enough to argue for in regular T20I circumstances, but within these constraints is borderline unjustifiable. He, however, is not the only player whose strike-rate ceiling is limited, with captain Salman Agha similarly struggling this tournament, and indeed over the broader span of his T20I career.
However, Pakistan are yet to show any evidence of an ability to rack up a win of that sort of scale at this tournament so far. Indeed, Pakistan have never won by that margin against a Full Member at a T20 World Cup when batting first, and only once – in 2009 – when chasing. The slower surfaces of Sri Lanka compared to the flatter pitches in India make a path to such a victory more complicated, as does a Pakistani middle order that doesn’t boast elite power hitting, and Saim Ayub’s faltering form. But it’s a chance nonetheless, and at ICC events, sometimes that’s all Pakistan ask for.
There’s little other than pride at stake for Sri Lanka, whose tournament started with such promise, only to peak and fall away after a glorious win over Australia. They have lost their last three matches, and were the first side to be knocked out in the Super Eight. Pakistan’s qualification scenarios mean little to them, and they’ll want to demonstrate they are more than foil for Pakistani glory, or a roadblock to their progression.
The story, though, is of what Pakistan can possibly achieve, and whether they can thwart New Zealand’s progress to yet another ICC tournament semi-final.
A lot of Sri Lankan players will invariably be moved on after this T20 World Cup, but one who is set to form the core of the side for the next generation is Dunith Wellalage. The 23-year old left arm spinner’s competitive attitude makes him one of a short list of Sri Lankan players to have come out of this tournament with his reputation bolstered, and he has an ever-improving skill-set to go with it. He is yet to play a T20I against Pakistan, having missed their Asia Cup clash, flying home for a family bereavement. But with a surfeit of right-hand batters in Pakistan’s top order, he could find himself deployed early on as he was against New Zealand, perhaps to nip Sahibzada Farhan in the bud at the outset.
Salman Agha should perhaps be under more scrutiny than he is, having endured an indifferent tournament with the bat and an uninspiring one as captain. The questions swirling around his fitness for the format will only intensify after he let games drift with the ball against India and England, while his attempted aggression with the bat at No. 3 continues to feel feigned rather than organic. He has scored 60 runs in five innings at this tournament, 38 in one innings against Namibia. If Pakistan exit tamely, it is hard to envision him hanging on to the armband, and perhaps even his role in the side. However, Saturday perhaps represents one final chance for him to take control of his destiny.
Sri Lanka faced plenty of criticism for their meek capitulation against New Zealand, but as the tournament closes out, wholesale changes are not likely. Kusal Mendis suffered hamstring stiffness against New Zealand and is unlikely to play, with Kamil Mishara returning as wicketkeeper-batter.
Sri Lanka (probable): Pathum Nissanka, Kamil Mishara (wk), Charith Asalanka, Pavan Rathnayake, Kamindu Mendis, Dasun Shanaka (capt), Dushan Hemantha, Dunith Wellalage, Dushmantha Chameera, Maheesh Theekshana, Dilshan Madushanka
Shaheen Afridi’s performance against England makes it likely he will keep his spot. If Pakistan are to stick to two specialist seamers on this surface, it makes it a straight shootout between Naseem Shah and Salman Mirza. What’s less certain is how the equation changes Pakistan’s batting line-up. So far, they have been reluctant to drop Babar Azam, or play Khawaja Nafay. Any caution needs to go out of the window as they battle to stay alive.
Pakistan (probable): Sahibzada Farhan, Saim Ayub, Salman Agha (capt), Babar Azam/Khawaja Nafay, Fakhar Zaman, Shadab Khan, Usman Khan (wk), Mohammad Nawaz/Faheem Ashraf, Shaheen Afridi, Salman Mirza/Naseem Shah, Usman Tariq
[Cricinfo]
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