Australian players will go home via Sri Lanka or the Maldives after IPL suspension: Cricket Australia

Several Australian players, coaches, and commentators part of the Indian Premier League 2021 will be moving out of India within the next few days after the cash-rich league was indefinitely suspended due to the COVID-19 outbreak in the bubble.

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Cricket Australia's interim chief executive Nick Hockley said that BCCI is working on getting a unit of 38 personnel safely out of India to either Maldives or Sri Lanka first before being allowed to head back to their homes.

“What we and the BCCI are working to do is to move the entire cohort out of India, where they will then wait until it’s possible to return to Australia,” Cricket Australia's interim chief executive Nick Hockley said, as quoted by the Guardian.

The Australian government imposed a travel ban on all flights from India until May 15 due to a massive surge in COVID-19 in India. 

“The BCCI has been working on a range of options. That’s now narrowed down to the Maldives and Sri Lanka. The BCCI are working through the final details of that at the moment and we expect that movement will happen in the next two to three days.”

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is set to lose over INR 2000 crore (US$ 217 million) of the broadcast and sponsorship money from the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2021, which was indefinitely postponed on Tuesday owing to a rise in COVID-19 cases across teams.

The BCCI was forced to postpone the IPL 2021 after multiple cases of COVID-19 were reported among players and support staff from Ahmedabad and New Delhi in the last couple of days.