England’s tour of South Africa has been abandoned due to concerns over a Covid-19 outbreak.
The increasingly inevitable conclusion was reached by the respective boards on Monday afternoon after three failed attempts to get the one-day international series up and running led only to scheduled matches being scrapped three times in the past four days.
Concerns over the integrity of the so-called ‘bio-secure environment’ at the teams’ shared base — the five-star Vineyard Hotel near Newlands in Cape Town — have been growing for over the past fortnight and the rising incidence of positive cases effectively ended any hopes of further cricket being played.
One Proteas player tested positive after the Twenty20 series — which England won 3-0 — leading to an initial postponement of the first ODI, but the news that two unnamed members of the touring party had also received ‘unconfirmed positives’ alongside two members of hotel staff, raised the alarm levels.
England’s medical team, led by Dr Moiz Moghal, asked for independent analysis of their samples having suspected potential ‘false positives’ from the pair, who are both understood to be asymptomatic. At that stage there was still some talk of playing back-to-back matches at Newlands on Tuesday and Wednesday, with Cricket South Africa standing to lose around £500,000 in broadcast money for every unfulfilled fixture.
But with players on each side understood to be uneasy about continuing in a bubble that had demonstrably burst, the writing was on the wall. The latest in a sequence of emergency talks between the ECB and CSA confirmed what most were by now expecting, leaving England to cut short their second overseas assignment in a row.
Back in March they left Sri Lanka ahead of two Test matches as the pandemic began to wreak havoc with the global sporting calendar.
