BDCA fixture: Association president Russell Lindroth happy with ‘middle of the road’ response to COVID issue

The Bunbury and Districts Cricket Association boss says its committee is happy with the “middle of the road” approach it settled on with its plan to halve the remaining rounds of the season. The South Western Times revealed on Tuesday that two more games would be played before a fast-tracked finals series begins as part of the BDCA’s bid to dodge growing COVID-19 case numbers. Two options were tabled to clubs last week, one of which was to end the season after last weekend’s round of games, while the other was to play the season out as fixtured — but neither were implemented, with the finals now set to begin after round 16. Association president Russell Lindroth said the executive wanted to allow as many games as possible to be played, while doing its best to ensure a finals series was played — but admitted the plan won’t please everyone. “We then thought, instead of cutting off super early, or letting it run its full course we have gone for a middle of the road situation where we don’t satisfy everybody, but we probably satisfy a lot more people, providing we get through to a finals series,” he said. “The things of importance we looked at were, the safety of our players, volunteers and the competition in general, we wanted to give as much game time as we thought was possible and we want a finals series — that’s why we have gone middle of the road. “We are hoping COVID will let us play our full finals series.” The traditional two-day grand final format has also been scrapped in favour of a one-day game for the first-grade competition, but the remainder of the finals format will be confirmed some time next week, depending on whether Bunbury will play the Country Cup grand final at Richardson Park on February 27. “We are shortening the season to reduce the possible impact of COVID and we are going to look a bit funny if we still play a two-day first grade grand final,” Lindroth said. “It is just to tie everything off on the one day, so all the finals will be finished on the one day.” Despite culling the second day, Lindroth wouldn’t rule out the possibility of playing the first-grade decider as a feature clash on the Sunday. “We had a brief discussion about that, but because our finals are all up in the air, once we know when our grand final is, we can have a look at a better way of doing it,” he said. “Having a standalone first grade grand final would be good for everybody — we could have a very good atmosphere.”