Australia has postponed their upcoming to-be-scheduled 3-match Test series in South Africa. This implies Australia won’t be having any Test matches before the scheduled ICC World Test Championship Final at Lord’s.
Australia has cited South Africa’s second COVID-19 wave while postponing this series. According to Cricket Australia, it would be too high a risk to take their players to South Africa which is currently battling a second wave of corona pandemic including the new variant of the virus.
“Following extensive due diligence with medical experts, it has become clear that traveling from Australia to South Africa at this current time poses an unacceptable level of health and safety risk to our players, support staff and the community,” said CA’s interim chief executive Nick Hockley.
“We acknowledge the significant amount of work by CSA in planning for the tour, during which we made it clear that CA was prepared to take on additional cost and effort to make the series happen,” added Hockley.
India is currently placed no. 1 in the standings with New Zealand, Australia, England in the next three positions of the table in the same order. With only India and England have Test matches remaining, Australia’s chances in the Final are now dependent on the 4-match Test series between India and England which will begin on February 05.
At this juncture, second-placed New Zealand are already through to World Test Championship Final. Here are three points that will simply qualification scenarios (after this recent development) for India, England and Australia.
- For India to Qualify, they need to win at least 2 Tests and win the series by any margin.
- For England to Qualify, they need to win at least 3 Tests in this series.
- For Australia to Qualify, any other result should come in the 4-match India vs England series except the two possibilities mentioned above.
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