T20 Cricket News

The ICC Board has endorsed a set of contingency plans to ensure that all players, team management, match officials, support staff and television crews and equipment can reach the Caribbean in time for the World Twenty20, despite the ongoing disruption to air travel in Europe.

Ireland, Zimbabwe and the host team West Indies are in the Caribbean already, but the board heard that arrangements were being made so that seven of the remaining eight affected men's teams - New Zealand are travelling via the United States - could be airlifted direct to the West Indies from Dubai with the aid of ICC partners, Emirates.

However, the situation for England still remains unclear and they may be required to find their way via land and sea to Dubai in order to catch the charter flight. That would mean leaving on Friday or Saturday, although it may yet be possible to use airports in the north of the UK or to travel to a European hub such as Madrid.

The ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat said: "We are doing everything possible to overcome the airline logistical challenges and we are extremely grateful to our commercial partner Emirates for putting forward a charter-flight option."

One of those teams is Afghanistan, whose World Twenty20 squad has been grounded in Dubai because of the closure of airports across Europe and will not arrive in the West Indies in time for their warm-up games against Trinidad & Tobago.

"We have been notified by the ICC's Richard Done that the Afghanistan team will not be coming to T&T and as such we have cancelled their games against T&T," Baldath Mahabir, a WICB director, told CMS. "Our understanding is that they are in Dubai and they are holding some training sessions there to make up for the loss of training down here."

An ash cloud from a volcanic eruption in Iceland had forced the closure of airspace over the UK and much of Europe since Thursday, resulting in the cancellation of thousands of flights and leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded. Afghanistan are pooled with India and South Africa in Group C of the ICC World Twenty20, which begins on April 30.

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