BDCA finals: Preliminary finals to go ahead despite positive case in Marist camp, according to league boss

The head of the Bunbury and Districts Cricket Association says it will do everything it can to play the final two weeks of the season as scheduled, despite the competition having its first real brush with COVID-19. A Marist player from Sunday’s dramatic women’s grand final has tested positive to the virus and now all Marist players involved in that match have been forced to isolate. And it could have potential ramifications for Saturday’s massive preliminary final triple-header at Forrest Park, with a number of the club’s senior men’s players believed to have been involved in premiership celebrations on Sunday night. At least one Marist player, whose partner plays for the club’s women’s team, is understood to be isolating. New restrictions which came into effect on Thursday are also likely to impact Saturday’s matches, with spectators to be locked out of Forrest Park. President Russell Lindroth said the association had called on all host clubs to provide a “ground supervisor”. “The level two health requirements are that there are no spectators,” he said. “We need to ensure the safe conduct of the game and we need to follow the Level 2 restrictions.” In February, the association said it had altered the playing conditions so that if a club had a significant number of players made unavailable by the virus, a game would be treated as an abandoned match. It would mean that in first and second grade, Marist go straight through to grand finals. “We will do everything we can to get a preliminary final played on Saturday,” Lindroth said. “If that one Marist men’s player was to test positive, that would count him out of the final, but what it means for the rest of the players we are not sure — it is really a wait and see. “If worse comes to worse, unfortunately the higher placed teams would go through to the grand final and in the first grade, that would be Marist.” The BDCA shortened its season by two weeks, bringing the start of the finals series forward in a bid to dodge the effects of the pandemic. The season will conclude the following weekend, with the two-day first grade grand final to finish on March 13.