RCB were scheduled to play Lucknow Super Giants on May 9, the day when IPL was suspended for a week due to India-Pakistan military conflict.
It was an evening marked by confusion, chaos, rumours and lack of clarity for the Royal Challengers Bengaluru players and staff when the IPL game in Dharamsala was called off, team’s Director of Cricket Mo Babat said on Friday, adding that they didn’t expect the conflict to resolve so soon. The RCB players were returning to their hotel by the team bus after a practice session when they saw images of Punjab Kings and Delhi Capitals cricketers leaving the Dharamsala stadium in darkness on May 8.
RCB were scheduled to play Lucknow Super Giants on May 9, the day when IPL was suspended for a week due to India-Pakistan military conflict.
“Yes, quite chaotic. Tried to stay quite calm and tried to get as much information from the BCCI as possible and try to communicate with clarity,” Bobat, the former England men’s team performance director, told RCB Bold Diaries.
“It was a pretty eventful evening. We practiced the day before the Lucknow game. And, then, actually on the bus on the way back, a lot of the guys were watching the game on their phones, the Punjab vs Delhi Capitals game.
“And then we saw the floodlights had gone out and the players had come off the field. We were not too sure what was going on, and only when we got back to the hotel we kind of got a proper sense of what was happening,” he added.
Bobat said the team only came to know about the IPL suspension only the next day. His initial thought was that the tournament would be called off.
“So that evening a lot of rumours, a lot of chat and the next morning we found out that our game wasn’t taking place and the competition had been suspended for a period.
“Our initial impression was that the competition would be called off for a period of time. You don’t expect a conflict like that to resolve itself, as it did.” He said RCB was mindful of the fact that the players, both Indian and overseas, would want to return to the safety of their homes, given the deteriorating situation.
“We were quite keen to send the players home because actually (it was) a good chance for them to have a break. So for the Indian players, that’s relatively straightforward.
“With the overseas players, myself and (head coach) Andy (Flower) sat them down and spoke to them all and said, ‘Look, what is your preference?’ and a lot of them said ‘look we’d like to go home because it’s a period of uncertainty but were very committed, and if we need to come back we’ll come back.” Reassembling the overseas players, who had left, was a far bigger task than sending them back to their respective countries, and it came with security assurances, and lots of liaisoning with the respective cricket boards.
“We found out Monday evening that the tournament is back on. So, overnight we were trying to find out as much security detail as possible because we needed to communicate that to the players.
“We made a quick decision to communicate to the Indian players about when we wanted them back. We also needed to liaise with some of the overseas governing bodies, the ECB, Cricket Australia, Cricket South Africa and West Indies because you need to know what impact it’s going to have on them.
“I lined up video calls with all of the overseas players, took them through the security detail, schedule, about how RCB were going to look after them, which is really important for them to understand because we want them to feel safe and happy here,” he added.
