Google News Ashley Giles spoke after positive cases in the team
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Ashley Giles spoke out about the measures being taken because of the pandemic. The reason for this is because 2 members of the English team were positive for COVID-19. The measures are a little milder than they used to be, but the delta variant looks much more dangerous "This year we tried to operate in what we called 'safe environments'," Giles said, as quoted by cricbuzz "Just from the nature of what we were doing this year, playing all around the country, traveling a lot, hotels weren't sole use.
We were sharing certain spaces within the hotel but not key areas like eating areas." "And given this [delta] variant, which is clearly more infectious, the risk of us catching an infection in the group was obviously going to go up." Gilles believes that easing restrictions by the ECB is not gambling "I don't believe we've gambled at all.
We are fully aware of the risks - no one is more than us. That is knife-edge we are working on all the time." "As well as looking after our people and keeping them sane as much as anything, we're protecting the revenues of the whole game.
And it's a really difficult balance to strike.
Balance
He thinks that it is difficult to balance everything during this time "It's something we are constantly juggling with and we are certainly juggling with the amount of time our players have spent in these environments." "We have extremely busy schedules and we've been doing this now for 14 or 15 months." "To expect them to adhere in the sense they go to the ground, they stay away from each other, they go back to the hotel, they put their masks on and go straight back to their rooms, eat on their own - it's almost impossible for that period of time without losing people.
Although they were expecting soon to return to the old way of life, a warning came "If we go back to the start of this summer, I think we always hoped we would move somewhat with society, as society started to open up. That was always the plan until the variant arrived." "So actually what we had planned in terms of opening up, in terms of much more access to families, eating outside, the normal freedoms other people are taking for granted right now, just didn't happen.
"We had discussions about this as recent as the weekend with the players. That we still hoped for this to be the case - and then this happens." "It's a reminder to all of us what this can do to a sports team particularly right now.
I guess we are sort of living at a different rate to society. We are almost misaligned, at odds to how society is operating." "That is particularly difficult when we know one case can shut you down, let alone seven."