Chris Woakes benefited from taking a break from the game and England’s winter schedule will test how far cricket has come
It has been 15 years since England played in Pakistan, a stretch that feels, nowadays, more than half a lifetime ago. They may go back there again in January. Wasim Khan, the chief executive of the Pakistan Cricket Board, has invited them out to play three Twenty20 games in the new year. And given the efforts Pakistan made to help the England and Wales Cricket Board fulfil its own fixture list by touring here during lockdown in the summer, the ECB is bound to agree. The difficulty is England are also supposed to play two Tests against Sri Lanka around the same time, and have a five‑Test series against India lined up soon afterwards.
So it’s going to be a long, busy winter. And unless the ECB’s research department is about to announce some radical new advances in quantum mechanics, it may be that the only way through it is going to be for the ECB to send separate squads on simultaneous tours. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Written by Andy Bull
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2020/oct/22/heaping-more-cricket-on-players-weighs-heavily-on-their-mental-wellbeing-england under the title “Heaping more cricket on players weighs heavily on their mental wellbeing | Andy Bull”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
