Pakistan bowling consultant, Vernon Philander would be flying out of Chattogram, the venue for the first Test of the two-match series taking place between Bangladesh and Pakistan. He would be doing in the middle of the Test (Day-4) because of the "shutdown of flight operations" in his home country of South Africa.
Many countries including Bangladesh had to shut down their flight operations to South Africa due to the development of a new variant of the Coronavirus named Omicron. The operations would be shit down after Monday and hence Philander, who was anyways scheduled to leave for home at the end of the first Test has decided to leave midway.
This is not the first event in the cricketing world that has been marred by the new variant. While the Netherlands abandoned its South Africa tour for the Super League after the first match was washed out, the ICC Women’s World Cup Qualification ongoing in Harare, Zimbabwe had to be called off midway as well.
It has now been cancelled with teams like Sri Lanka and Thailand left to ruin it as they were not able to progress to the World Cup and Women’s Cricket League respectively even after putting out solid performances.
India A team is also currently on tour in South Africa and has not been called back. The senior Indian team is also slated to tour the rainbow nation in the near future and the status f that tour has remained unchanged. It would be interesting to see if changes do take place or not in the coming days as things develop.
As fast as the Test match between Bangladesh and Pakistan is concerned, courtesy of Shaheen Afridi’s amazing spell, Pakistan have inched ahead at the end of the third day’s play. Bangladesh, even after taking a lead of 44 runs in the first innings, have managed to add only 39 runs to it and lost its top four players in the cause.
They now lead by 83 runs with Mushfiqur Rahim and Yasir Ali at the crease and last innings’ centurion Liton Das and all-rounder Mehidy Hasan Miraz still to come.