The Indian team is set to fly home via a charter flight on Tuesday evening after Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley said she expected the airport to become operational in the “next six to 12 hours”, ending the shutdown forced by a category 4 hurricane.
The T20 World Cup-winning squad, its support staff, some BCCI officials and the players’ families have been stranded in Barbados for the past two days due to Hurricane Beryl, which hit the island on Sunday evening.
“I don’t want to speak in advance of it, but I have literally been in touch with the airport personnel and they’re doing their last checks now and we want to resume normal operations as a matter of urgency,” Mottley told PTI.
“There are a number of people who were due to leave last night late or today or tomorrow morning. And we want to make sure that we can facilitate those persons, so I would anticipate that within the next six to 12 hours the airport will be open.”
The Indian contingent is expected to leave Bridgetown at 6pm local time and land in Delhi on Wednesday at 7.45pm IST, according to a source. The players will be later felicitated by prime minister Narendra Modi but the schedule of that event has not yet been finalised.
Five of the players – Rinku Singh, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shivam Dube, Khaleel Ahmed and Sanju Samson – are supposed to travel to Zimbabwe for a five-match T20I series. The rest of the squad for the series left India earlier on Tuesday.
Life-threatening winds and storms lashed Barbados and nearby islands on Monday. The country, with a population of close to 300,000, has been in lockdown since Sunday evening.
“[We have] been working to ensure that everyone is safe in Barbados, Barbadians and all of the visitors, of course, who came for the cricket World Cup,” Mottley said. “We were very blessed that the storm did not come on land. The hurricane was 80 miles south of us, which limited the level of damage on shore. But as you can see, infrastructure and coastal assets have been badly damaged.
“It could have been a lot worse, but now is the time to do the recovery and the clean-up.”
The window for the Indian team to leave Bridgetown is a narrow one as Mottley revealed “we have another hurricane coming on Wednesday”.
