Un­less you had re­cent­ly trav­elled to Mars, you are like­ly to know that the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) crick­et tour­na­ment was con­duct­ed in a se­ries of bio-se­cure bub­bles. Play­ers and of­fi­cials were housed in a bio-se­cure bub­ble at the Hilton Trinidad ho­tel and the games were played in the bio-se­cure bub­bles of the Queen’s Park Oval and the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Acad­e­my, de­void of sup­port­ers. There was a third bub­ble that, for good rea­sons, was not wide­ly pub­li­cised.

Now that the tour­na­ment has come and gone and the win­ners (the Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers) have emerged, it is safe to talk about the bio-se­cure train­ing bub­ble on the St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus of The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI). Train­ing be­fore a com­pe­ti­tion is ab­solute­ly es­sen­tial but so too is train­ing dur­ing the com­pe­ti­tion, at which stage ad­vanc­ing teams get to re­cal­i­brate their strate­gies on the ba­sis of which teams they would be up against in the rest of the com­pe­ti­tion and to ad­just any sus­pect tech­niques.

The lo­ca­tion and self-con­tained con­fig­u­ra­tion of UWI’s Sir Frank Wor­rell Field make it a per­fect can­di­date for a bio-se­cure arrange­ment. Be­cause it has its own ded­i­cat­ed en­trance, play­ers and their man­age­ment teams could en­ter and ex­it with­out any con­tact with the main cam­pus.

This al­so makes it easy to keep out unau­tho­rised in­ter­nal and ex­ter­nal par­ties. CPL was en­thu­si­as­tic about the idea and the St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus Prin­ci­pal, Pro­fes­sor Bri­an Copeland, need­ed no con­vinc­ing. For the cam­pus, this was just an­oth­er lev­el of col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Gov­ern­ment in the man­age­ment of COVID-19, hav­ing al­ready of­fered Cana­da Hall, Free­dom Hall and the Debe Cam­pus as quar­an­tine/step-down cen­tres.

The con­ver­sion of Sir Frank Wor­rell Field could not have been done with­out the col­lab­o­ra­tion of many arms of the cam­pus and the na­tion. Cam­pus se­cu­ri­ty, the cam­pus Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Health, Safe­ty and the En­vi­ron­ment (OS­HE) Unit and Mar­ket­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion formed the first line of col­lab­o­ra­tors.

OSH was on hand to ver­i­fy that the process took the safe­ty of staff in­to con­sid­er­a­tion; cam­pus se­cu­ri­ty worked with the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty to en­sure that they had ap­pro­pri­ate ac­cess to the cam­pus; and Mar­ket­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion was, wait for it, in­vit­ed to keep the good news out of the press! There was the fear that if word got out that the teams were train­ing on cam­pus, some fans might be tempt­ed to come on cam­pus for a glimpse of their favourite play­ers in the flesh and, by so do­ing, com­pro­mise the bub­ble.

The next group of col­lab­o­ra­tors com­prised per­son­nel from the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and Min­istry of Health. Cap­tain An­tho­ny Blake, with of­fi­cers from the Fire-Ser­vice, co­or­di­nat­ed the as­sess­ment of the venue and de­ter­mined the quan­tum of se­cu­ri­ty cov­er­age that would be need­ed. Dr Os­afo Fras­er led the Min­istry of Health team to ad­vise on the set-up and man­age­ment of the hot and cold in­fec­tious zones, as well as the doff­ing tent for the clean­er and the grounds crew.

The Min­istry of Health pro­vid­ed us with a six-page guide doc­u­ment de­tail­ing step-by-step pro­ce­dures for all those who were go­ing to be in­volved in the run­ning of the bub­ble. Be­fore the start date, the min­istry al­so sent nurse Keisha Pre­vatt-Gomez to train the rel­e­vant staff on the prop­er way to don, take off, and dis­pose of PPEs and the pro­to­col for man­ag­ing the doff­ing tent and the dis­pos­al of bio­med­ical waste.

The re­al he­roes of the con­tri­bu­tion of the St Au­gus­tine Acad­e­my of Sport to the suc­cess of CPL 2020 are the clean­er (Ms Janet Cox) and the grounds crew un­der the lead­er­ship of Mr Ram­nath Per­sad. It was a month-long pres­sure-cook­er op­er­a­tion. In ad­di­tion to mak­ing sure the pavil­ion was ap­pro­pri­ate­ly cleaned and the grounds pre­pared to the spec­i­fi­ca­tions of the teams, this group of work­ers had to put up with a lead­er­ship that con­stant­ly ha­rangued them about the need to ob­serve COVID-19 pro­to­cols, both at work and away from work, be­cause of the po­ten­tial im­pli­ca­tions of their ac­tions on them­selves, the oth­er staff at the acad­e­my, the CPL teams and their man­age­ment staff and the fam­i­lies of all the groups in­volved in CPL 2020.

On a lighter note, while we did not have to con­tend with gate-crash­ing fans, we had to deal with how to keep some mem­bers of staff as far away from the hot zone as pos­si­ble. Many watched from the safe­ty of the south­ern en­trance in­to the Sport and Phys­i­cal Ed­u­ca­tion Cen­tre (SPEC) build­ing. But even there, one or two watch­ers nar­row­ly es­caped be­ing hit by er­rant balls that sailed be­yond the bound­ary of the hot zone. We are re­li­ably in­formed that one or two COVID-19 free balls are lodged on the roof of SPEC. Some­day in the fu­ture, a work­er would find those balls and won­der how on earth they got there. If he is a crick­et lover, he might re­mem­ber that CPL 2020 had some hard-hit­ters and that Sir Frank Wor­rell Field was their bio-se­cure prac­tice bub­ble.

Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor Fun­so Aiye­ji­na is Head, St Au­gus­tine Acad­e­my of Sport and can be reached at Fun­so.Aiye­ji­na@sta.uwi.edu