Contests, crowds and COVID

As the multi million dollar IPL tournament begins yet again in the pandemic, Health Analytics Asia looks at what COVID-19 has done to the world of sports, how sports has risen, and how IPL plans on staying COVID-free.

As cricket’s richest league tournament gets underway, for the second time in COVID era, safety preparations and precautions have remained a hot topic, often eclipsing the sport itself. But IPL isn’t the only sporting event to take place in COVID. Football leagues and tournaments have resumed, tennis grand slams have been held,

Health Analytics Asia looks at the health aspects of the IPL, and how sports has handled the pandemic.

COVID hits sports, hard

Some of the world’s most anticipated events were scheduled for 2020 – biggest of them being the Tokyo Olympics and the UEFA Euro 2020. Both have been pushed to 2021. The coveted Wimbledon Championships were cancelled, so was the Boston Marathon, for the first time in its 124 year history. COVID’s impact on sports was like on any other industry – brutal.

In the early days of the pandemic, the World Health Organization issued considerations and key planning recommendations for sports federations and event organisers. These included crowd control and precautionary measures such as risk communication, staggered entrances and exits, and isolation facilities. But as countries imposed travel restrictions and went into lockdowns, sports events were shut altogether.

A study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has projected that the sports industry’s growth will considerably slow down – 3.3 per cent over the next five years, as opposed to the 8 per cent growth seen over the last five years.

Did sporting events trigger outbreaks?

In February 2020, a UEFA Champions League football match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid was heavily scrutinised for allowing Spanish fans to travel to the UK amid rising cases in the Iberian nation. Experts later claimed that over 40 COVID deaths could be directly traced back to that match alone.

Another Champions League clash, between Atlanta and Valencia, was played to a full stadium, right at the cusp of Italy’s wave of infections and deaths. Social distancing and masks were not a norm then, and both these events are said to have contributed heavily to the spread of the virus.

More recently, the test match between Australia and India in Melbourne in December 2020 suffered a scare as one of the spectators later tested positive forcing thousands of fans to get tested.

Several of the matches in India’s home series games against England were played in front of crowds. But even as the last few matches of the India vs England series were played behind closed doors, the Road Safety Series – a Maharashtra government initiative aimed at public awareness – continued with heavy attendance at Raipur.

While no official link has yet been drawn between the surge in cases and these matches, lack of adherence to protective measures was a common sight. Several players from the Road Safety Series tested positive after the tournament ended, including Sachin Tendulkar, Irfan Pathan and Yusuf Pathan.

And as the country was also accelerating towards its second wave, the decisions to have crowds at Raipur, raises questions

Image: Crowd at the first T20I between India and England at Ahmedabad (Courtesy: BCCI)

The strategies for IPL 2021 – SOPs and, bio bubbles

Post lockdown, the sports industry has been recovering from the disruptions in training schedules of the athletes, and re-building relationships with broadcasters, sponsors and vendors.

India’s Sports Ministry issued guidelines for organising outdoors or indoors sports events, in December 2020. It recommended a Task Force team at every event, with 50% spectator capacity and CCTV monitoring for crowd-control, among other precautionary measures.

A favorite hosting arrangement for all major sports in the pandemic era has been bio secure bubbles. These ensure events are held behind closed doors, often with strict quarantine and safety protocols, minimising infection risk. Bio bubbles have been a go-to arrangement for almost all major sports – including football, basketball, tennis, and of course cricket. IPL employed bio bubbles in 2020, and will continue to do so this year as well.

So what’s with this year’s IPL?

IPL 14 is being held from April 9, 2021 to May 30, 2021 across India. Among the many changes in the way the show is run, no team will be playing a match at their home ground. The host cities for the first two weeks of the tournament – Chennai and Mumbai –  are among the worst hit cities in the country right now.

With the country well in the thick of its second wave, the Board of Control for Cricket in India issued a new set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and protocols for safe bubble to bubble transfer of players post-England series, among other precautionary measures.

The SOP highlights that players who joined their squad directly from the preceding India vs England series need not undergo a quarantine period or undergo RT-PCR tests.

In all, 12 Bubbles have been created – eight for the franchise teams and their support staff, two for match officials and match management teams, and two for broadcast commentators and crew. The franchises with previous bio bubbles, and satisfactory travel arrangements, as per the BCCI Chief Medical Officer (CMO), were entitled bubble-to-bubble transfer as well.

BCCI has also cleared that IPL players have not been vaccinated on a priority basis, thus adhering to the government’s vaccination scheme.

But IPL 2021 is riskier than 2020

The previous edition of the IPL was held over eight weeks from September to November of 2020, after being pushed from its original schedule of March-April. The event was also held outside India, as regulations in India did not yet allow for sporting events to be held in stadiums. Come 2021, and the IPL is back in India. Is COVID in India better now? No, it’s much worse. And this puts the entire system at great risk.

The host cities in 2020 were Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. None of these cities saw a surge in cases over the entire duration of the tournament. UAE, on the whole, was relatively unscathed. 2021’s host cities – Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Ahmedabad – are all major hotspots right now. Mumbai alone has been recording over 9000 cases everyday for nearly a week now. Bio bubbles, as secure as they may be, will be tested in totally different circumstances now.

Stringency of bio bubbles has also been questioned, with as many as 14 members of the IPL broadcasters group testing positive while inside the bubble.

Leading cricket news website Cricinfo has analysed the vulnerabilities in the IPL 2021 bubble, highlighting the arbitrariness of rules, and the changes since 2020 – mostly for the worse. A case in point is Devdut Paddikal, a player for the Royal Challengers Bangalore franchise, who was allowed to travel by road, and join training directly without having to undergo a quarantine. Paddikal was recently tested positive.

A multi million dollar industry, IPL is a job and revenue generating machine – for the BCCI as well as the local bodies. Whether the risk of holding it in amidst a surge in cases is worth the benefits, is a question that, for now, remains unanswered.