Auckland [New Zealand]: The Women's ODI World Cup will take place as per schedule across the six venues in New Zealand, from March 4, tournament CEO Andrea Nelson has said. On Sunday, New Zealand's bilateral series for the rest of the season moved to a condensed list of grounds in the wake of a community outbreak of the Omicron variant that put the nation under enhanced Covid-19 restrictions.
"We did look at multiple contingency plans over the last 12 months as you can well imagine. But the plan is to retain the schedule as it is with the six venues. The contingency measures we're putting in place relate to kind of partaking the travel between those venues as much as possible," said Andrea Nelson as reported by ESPNcricinfo.
"One of the factors [of hosting a multi-team cricket event] in New Zealand is that our venues are very different to, for example, some of the venues in the subcontinent or the UK. For those that have watched cricket in New Zealand, we've got grass-bank stadiums, [and] smaller stadiums that don't have hotels built into them. So it's a very different environment to how some of it have been staged recently," she added.
The venues for the 31-match tournament are Mount Maunganui, Dunedin, Wellington, Auckland, Hamilton and Christchurch. "In terms of the delivery of the event for the players, it has not brought about any changes because we had been planning alongside the ICC for the safest possible tournament. So there are no significant changes to the way we deliver it for the players. Predominantly, the changes are related to the spectators inside the stadium," Nelson said.
"New Zealand has moved to a traffic-light system... And broadly speaking, that puts at the moment attendance [which] can be only in groups of 100. So the work we're undertaking at the moment is how many groups of 100 can we fit within each stadium. And we're working through a bit of detail on all that ... But really, the message is: we set out to kind of create a fantastic platform for these athletes to perform on, and we remain fully committed to doing that," she added.
On Thursday, the NZC made several changes concerning venues for its upcoming international season to reduce risks of exposure to the Omicron variant. All of India Women's six limited-overs matches were moved to the John Davies Oval in Queenstown. Earlier, McLean Park in Napier was to hold the one-off T20I and the opening ODI, the Saxton Oval in Nelson was slated to stage the second and third ODIs on February 14 and 16, and the final two ODIs were to be played in Queenstown on February 22 and 24. (ANI)
