England are More Worried About Insurance Than Series: Salman Butt on Cancelled Test Match

'I feel they (ECB) are more worried about the 40m loss'- Salman Butt

The India vs England cancelled Test match is the talk of the town and people have come up with different angles regarding the cancellation of the high voltage match. The British media have heavily criticized the Indian team for breaking COVID protocols and many pundits have come up with opinions against and for it. Former Pakistan captain Salman Butt lashed out at ECB that the English team are more worried about their financial losses rather than thinking about a plan to make a comeback in the series.

I feel they (ECB) are more worried about the 40m loss. They only want the insurance claim, and haven’t even talked about the match [in the request],” he said on his YouTube channel.

The match was canceled due to the COVID outbreak in the India team and the Final Test was called off just two hours prior to the game as team physio Yogesh Parmar’s report came out as positive. Head coach Ravi Shastri was the first one to test positive followed by other members of the staff. ECB are working alongside BCCI to resolve the matter but ECB CEO Tom Harrison wants a one-off match, next year when England visits India. On the flipside Sourav Ganguly has made it clear that if the next match takes place in England’s tour of India in 2022, then it will be treated as the fifth match of the series.

ECB has requested ICC to reschedule the match as a one-off match, in which Salman Butt believes it has nothing to do with the match and only to do with the money and it won’t be an easy call for ICC to make.

“They (ECB) have only said that if you (the ICC) write this (that the match was forfeited), we’ll recover the money from insurance. They aren’t saying something like, ‘For the sake of God, please play the match, the points are very important, we don’t want to lose the series but equalize it at 2-2’. They haven’t written anything like it,” Butt said.

“It’s unresolved, which is why it’s being described as a ‘dispute’, and if it was resolved, England would not have written to the ICC… If England had accepted BCCI’s offers for T20s or Tests, they wouldn’t have gone towards the dispute committee. Indian players also had their concerns when their physio tested positive… It’s not straightforward and we’ll have to see how ICC resolves this,” Butt added.