Spit and polish may disappear in coronavirus era

Players are yet to make a decision about using saliva to polish the ball in Friday’s first ODI between New Zealand and Australia.

Australian captain Aaron Finch, centre, at the SCG with his team

Players are yet to make a decision about using saliva to polish the ball in Friday’s first ODI between New Zealand and Australia in Sydney, but coronavirus was the topic of the day among both teams as they trained at the SCG.

The two sides gathered as news broke that the NBA had suspended the basketball season in the USA.

Cricket Australia has a medical group monitoring the situation and advising players.

“We haven’t spoken about it specifically yet, I think Cricket Australia have put together a coronavirus group to work out some strategies and no doubt we’ll find out about them later today,” Australian captain Aaron Finch said.

A number of sports are being conducted without fans.

“It would be weird to play in an empty stadium,” Finch said. “You get so used to accustomed to the atmosphere of the fans and riding the momentum when you are playing at home, if it comes to that we will wait and see, we saw the NBA being suspended, it’s not ideal but there’s a lot of people affected and that’s unfortunate.”

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Finch, who plays for Royal Challengers Bangalore in the Indian Premier League, said players were being updated on the situation there.

“Franchises have been great updating players pretty much daily on how that looks and how that’s going to affect anything, but we are just focusing on tomorrow, I know it’s difficult when it’s a pandemic now, it’s going to be tough and no doubt there’ll be restrictions in place for teams and fans and it will be interesting to see how it unfolds,” he said.

Black Caps captain Kane Williamson was asked if the New Zealanders would be comfortable shining the ball with saliva.

“I hadn’t thought much about that, I guess it’s not a big part of the white-ball format, but you can never be too cautious in terms of good hygiene because clearly it’s a pretty horrible thing,” he said.

Cricket New Zealand has been advising players.

“(We’ve had) A number of emails from medical staff at home and the upkeep of good hygiene and things, it’s a concern all around the world at the moment, other countries are affected a lot more at the moment, no one’s exempt it seems to be travelling the globe so suddenly you need to be very cautious,” Williamson said.

“Obviously (there’s) a lot of uncertainty around large crowds at the moment and hopefully it’s no issue here with playing these games.

“Hopefully we get some really good healthy crowds, but it seems to pop up all of a sudden where some of those decisions are being made and it’s being taken incredibly seriously and rightly so, we’ll wait and see.”