The Indian team will fly home on a chartered plane on Tuesday evening after Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley said she expected the airport to be operational “in the next six to 12 hours”, ending the closure forced by the Category 4 storm.
The T20 World Cup winning team, its staff, BCCI officials and the players’ families have been stranded in Barbados for the past two days due to Cyclone Beryl, which hit the island on Sunday evening.
“I don’t want to talk too early about it, but I have contacted the airport staff and they are doing a final check now and we want to resume normal operations as a matter of urgency,” Mottley told PTI. .
“There are a number of people who had to leave last night or today or tomorrow morning. And we want to make sure that we can help those people, so I expect that in the next six to 12 hours the airport will be completely open.”
The Indian team 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 also be felicitated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi but the program for that event has not been finalised.
Five of the players – Rinku Singh, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shivam Dube, Khaleel Ahmed and Sanju Samson – are due to travel to Zimbabwe for the five-match T20I series. All the other players in the series went ahead in India on Tuesday.
Life-threatening winds and hurricanes battered Barbados and nearby islands on Monday. The country, which has a population of around 300,000, has been on lockdown since Sunday evening.
“[We have] We’ve been working to make sure everyone is safe in Barbados, Barbadians and all the visitors, of course, who came to the cricket World Cup,” Mottley said. “We’re very blessed that the storm didn’t hit the ground. The storm was 80 kilometers south of us, which reduced the level of damage on the coast. But as you can see, the infrastructure and the coastal property were badly damaged.
“It could have been worse, but now is the time to recover and clean up.”
The window for the Indians’ departure from Bridgetown is narrow as Mottley revealed that “we have another storm coming on Wednesday”.
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