Mickey Arthur reveals mixing with England after Bristol ODI with India series due to start in a week
Sri Lanka’s ODI squad face an anxious wait for the results of their PCR tests on returning home, following a Covid-19 outbreak in the England squad after the final match of their tour in Bristol on Sunday.
“We arrived here [in Colombo] and we haven’t been allowed to enter our rooms without the result of a rapid antigen test, which luckily, I think most of our squad have got through. We’ve done another PCR where the results come out tomorrow [Wednesday]. At the end of that ODI there was a fair amount of banter between the two teams – quite a lot of chat and quite a lot of talk – so it did bring about some anxious times.
“I feel so desperately sorry for that England team because they’re a hell of a good cricket side at the moment. They were on a roll, they were playing really well and they just looked the part. For them to have to go and self-isolate now is really, really tough. And the cheeky part of me said, ‘jeez, why couldn’t we play against the 18 that have just come in?'”
“I know there is a disciplinary panel that’s been set up and I think those players will get a severe penalty,” he said. “What that is, I don’t know. I’ve seen one year being mooted and it almost kind of reminds me of Sandpapergate, where you crash to the lowest point and then try to build it up again. I’m not sure what’s going to happen with that [but] we’re obviously keen to get [numbers] one, four and five back as soon as possible with a T20 World Cup in mind.
“[It was] one of the toughest tours I’ve been on in my 12 years as an international coach, just in the sense that there was so much going on around the tour. There was obviously still the stand-off between the players and the board around contracts which hasn’t been resolved. Not wanting to make an excuse around that, there was a lot of instability there.
“We took a very, very young squad that we wanted to build with for the next couple of years but the three batsmen central to that unfortunately went walkabout in Durham and we lost our number one, four and five. That didn’t help either. It was really tough.
“The positives I’d take out of it, I thought Kusal Janith [Perera] led the team very, very well in very trying times and I thought our quick bowling attack was fairly good which was great. We know we’ve got the spinners but to see some of our quicks come through was really, really exciting.”
Matt Roller is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo. @mroller98