LON­DON – Crick­et South Africa con­firmed on Sat­ur­day that its team would not tour the Caribbean in Sep­tem­ber as hoped, deal­ing a harsh blow to Crick­et West In­dies’ plans of host­ing a ma­jor se­ries this year.

For­mer Test cap­tain Graeme Smith, CSA’s di­rec­tor of crick­et, said with South Africa’s play­ers set to be in­volved in the resched­uled In­di­an Pre­mier League, any win­dow for an over­seas bi­lat­er­al tour would now be dif­fi­cult to cre­ate.

Or­gan­is­ers an­nounced re­cent­ly that the lu­cra­tive IPL would now be staged in the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates from be­tween Sep­tem­ber 19 and No­vem­ber 8.

The pe­ri­od had been al­so iden­ti­fied by CWI as a pos­si­ble win­dow to host South Africa in a short Test or lim­it­ed overs se­ries, at the back end of the Caribbean Pre­mier League which runs from Au­gust 18 to Sep­tem­ber 10.

“West In­dies has been post­poned in­def­i­nite­ly. We are strug­gling to find a time with the IPL be­ing fit­ted in,” Smith said told a me­dia con­fer­ence. “It looks like our play­ers are go­ing to be need­ed from the be­gin­ning of Sep­tem­ber, gov­ern­ment-per­mit­ting, and trav­el per­mit­ting.

“Sri Lan­ka al­so [post­poned]. I ex­pect that once things get up and run­ning, our team, on the men’s side, I would say from No­vem­ber on­wards, if all goes well, it will be a re­al­ly busy pe­ri­od for South African crick­et, prob­a­bly play­ing in times that we haven’t played be­fore and try­ing to cram in a lot of the missed tours.”

South Africa were sched­uled to play two Tests and five Twen­ty20 In­ter­na­tion­als from Ju­ly 23 to Au­gust 16 be­fore the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic halt­ed crick­et across the globe.

But with West In­dies’ three-Test tour of Eng­land hailed as a suc­cess for “bio-se­cure” crick­et, CWI had hoped to lure South Africa to the Caribbean in or­der to kick-start its home pro­gramme.

How­ev­er, chief ex­ec­u­tive John­ny Grave had al­so ac­knowl­edged that any home se­ries would have been de­pen­dent on when the IPL was played.

“We very much hope that South African will be able to come here in Sep­tem­ber for ei­ther a T20-on­ly tour or a Test-on­ly tour at the very least,” he said re­cent­ly.

“It will be de­pen­dent on the IPL. South Africa have a num­ber of their Test play­ers who have IPL con­tracts, where­as this cur­rent Test team we don’t have any IPL play­ers in.

“We won’t be able to play Test crick­et against South Africa dur­ing the IPL – Crick­et South Africa have made that very clear to us. They’ve got a com­mit­ment to their play­ers to al­low them to go and play in the IPL.”

And with New Zealand lim­it­ed-overs tour ini­tial­ly planned for Ju­ly 8-19 al­so post­poned, it means cash-strapped CWI are with­out any means of im­prov­ing its ail­ing fi­nances.

CMC