Former Proteas all rounder and head coach, Eric Simons, is Chennai Super Kings assistant and bowling coach and will be filing a weekly diary from IPL 2020 for the next 10 weeks.
I’ve been sitting in my hotel room in Dubai for five days now. I’ve had two trips out and they were for Covid-19 tests – I even got to see a different floor of the hotel, but it looked exactly the same.
The whole experience has been slightly surreal from the moment we flew out of Cape Town at 8:00am on Friday and spent 10 hours at a largely deserted OR Tambo Airport waiting for the evening flight. It felt like much of the two preceding weeks had been spent filling out forms and doing paperwork….and of course the prerequisite Covid test.
Landing at Dubai airport it was straight to the testing area to have what can only be described as a very long ear bud shoved down each nostril for my second test of the week. Then it was straight to the hotel room and I’ve been here ever since. The view of the Burj Khalifa is mesmerising but there is only so long you can stare at a building, even if it is the tallest one in the world.
Our team manager, Russell Radhakrishnan, an absolute CSK stalwart, has been in Dubai for two weeks already and has his hands full trying to keep the wheels of a franchise rolling and the spirits of an IPL squad up while they are locked in their rooms.
All of the squad have plenty of rubber bands for resistance training and stretching in our rooms but there’s no doubt we’re all missing some cardio exercise. But there will be no running on the streets of Dubai when the first week of quarantine is over. The medical protocols which start in a few days are comprehensive, to say the least.
After seven days we can enter our ‘team bubble’ which means maintaining two-metres between us and eating in our own dining room in the hotel. We have limited access to the hotel gym which will only be at specific times after a sanitisation process and no other hotel guests will allowed so the bubble is maintained. We will all wear an electronic wrist band which ‘beeps’ an alert if we get too close to each other but will also allow the medical staff to track and trace which members of the squad have been in closest proximity in the event that we get a positive case.
Every squad member has a Covid test every second day of the isolation period and then every five days during the tournament. We have all also been provided with our box of 60 CSK-branded face masks. I’m not sure we’ll need that many over the next 10 weeks – unless we have to train in them in which case they will undoubtedly get very, very sweaty in the Dubai heat. The bowlers will be changing them every ball!
We have had Zoom meetings of some nature every day so far and even an intra-squad meeting with all the teams, the tournament organisers and other officials – there were over 600 people involved.
The sense of isolation is very strange. I had back-to-back Zoom ‘meetings’ with CSK bowlers yesterday. When we finished I realised that one of the bowlers was in the room next door to me. He may as well have been back in India. It’s a strange new normal.
The room service menu is varied and the quality of the food is outstanding although the prices are a little eye-watering, certainly by South African standards. The Wagyu beef burger is R640 at the current Dirham/Rand exchange rate with the fish and chips coming in at R620.
I usually travel with a set of golf clubs but was forewarned that there would be no golf in the bubble so all I brought was a fold-up putter. I have a slight left to right putt over ten foot in my room so will hopefully be deadly from that range when we emerge from the bubble – provided I can find a golf course with greens as smooth and flat as the hotel carpet.
I assume you don't have to pay for those meals yourself! Any saffa's in your squad? When can you have a net?