England's one-day international series in South Africa has been postponed on medical grounds after a series of coronavirus cases.
The first ODI was scheduled to take place on Friday but was postponed after a South Africa player tested positive. The teams tried again on Sunday but the match was abandoned due to two members of staff at the England hotel testing positive for Covid-19, with the tourists also announcing two unconfirmed positive tests among their party later in the day.
While England are still waiting for the results of those tests to be confirmed, Cricket South Africa and the England and Wales Cricket Board have made the decision to call off the series and try to rearrange it at a later date.
Sky Sports pundits and former England captains Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton gave their views on the postponement and the impact it could have on international cricket as the pandemic continues...
Nasser Hussain
It's obviously a massive, massive shame. When you think of the amount of money, effort, and time to put up that secure bubble - well, it doesn't seem quite so secure now.
Everything that had to be put in place to get a tour like this on in Covid times and the players hanging around waiting to play, everyone at home waiting, everyone in South African cricket waiting with the money that they're going to lose through broadcast rights, it's a huge shame.
But as the ECB has always said, they will put the wellbeing and the health of their players at the forefront. They will not risk that and if the bubble has been breached, then they will not risk a single player's health or more importantly, taking that home to England and risking other people's health. So it's probably the right thing.
There is a little part of me that says those other countries did it for us - Pakistan came over when we were at the height of our risk of Covid infections, and there is a little bit of me saying we should have done that for CSA as well because they'll be hit hard by this setback.
We've not heard anything about those (unconfirmed positive) tests at all. If they do come back negative, then the players and the ECB might think, 'well, let's get out while everyone is safe and no-one does have Covid', as opposed to hanging around for two or three days and risk one person picking it up.
If one person picks it up and tests positive, then they have to stay 10 days or others take it home, so that may be why they're doing it that way.
Everyone (in world cricket) will start looking at their Covid protocols, and their bio-secure protocols. It's a bit of give and take really, because if you make it so stringent as it was in the summer in England with the Ageas Bowl and Old Trafford, then you start getting concerned about the mental wellbeing and health of the cricketers. They're on top of them all the time; a few of them really struggled with that.
What they've done out here is that they've been a little bit more accommodating and said to players that they can go out, but they must make sure they travel only with people who are in the bubble. You can go out and play golf but come straight back and you're not compromising anything.
They've tried to look after their players' mental wellbeing and that may have backfired a little bit. You're always trying to get that balance between making a bubble so stringent that Covid cannot, or should not, get in but then have the players saying 'I'm not sure I can do this for much longer'. We've already had Tom Curran and Tom Banton pull out of the Big Bash so there are a lot of issues.
A lot of those players would have had a lot of bubbles beforehand, whether it be in the summer with England or the IPL or they have bubbles to come with Big Bash or in Sri Lanka. They would have had this window to either sit in quarantine in Australia or a window of getting home and seeing family and having a bit of time of not passing Covid tests, not having everything on top of you.
I think it was the final straw when that bubble was breached - the players must have gone "enough". The ECB and CSA are absolutely right to look after the mental wellbeing of their players. It's the timing. If this bubble breakdown had happened right at the start of the tour, they could have fixed it and the players could have had a week of doing nothing and then carried on.
The last thing any of those players want is to pick up Covid from a bubble that has been breached and take that home or take it to Australia - that's their worst-case scenario.
There is no good time to get Covid but getting it now and taking it back home to relatives is an absolute nightmare. They weren't willing to risk it. It probably wouldn't have happened but in the back of their hotel room, they were probably thinking 'can we get out now please?'
Mike Atherton
(The England players) have lost confidence in the security of the arrangements and the protocols designed to keep the hotel virus-free. I'm sure they've become increasingly concerned. South Africa's chief medical officer was fairly up front when he said they don't know how the bubble had been breached and that England were concerned, and right to be concerned.
The only thing is that we were waiting for these Covid results, these two unconfirmed positive cases. If they come back negative, then people will think that England have slightly jumped the gun. But it is clearly the players pushing this and they've lost confidence in South Africa to keep that area at the vineyard Covid-free.
If the tests come back positive, then the two have to stay behind but not only that, you also have a frantic search to find out who was in their vicinity, which I think is defined as within two metres for 15 minutes indoors.
In a bubble and in a team environment, you'd think that would include quite a lot of players. So that was always the fear, that these players who have got a short window of bubble-free life - given that Sri Lanka is coming, India, the IPL too - that then would be curtailed because they'd have to stay here for an extra amount of time.
Atherton and Mark Butcher discuss a remarkable - and completely unique - English summer of cricket
You have to throw things forward. We hope that the vaccine gets life back to normal from Easter but if it doesn't and England have to go through this situation again next summer of creating bio-secure environments for their cricketers, they won't want the precedent set where it is easy for the players not to fulfil the fixtures, so we will have to wait and see. But you can imagine things getting very messy as we come out of this situation.
We always felt that today was going to be a waiting day, to wait for the verification of those two tests that were sent away and then the players were tested again. I would like to wait and see what those tests say but if they were positive - and we'll find out in due course - I find it very difficult to see how the tour could go on and I said that right from the outset.
You've then got this situation where you're leaving players behind, and other players may have to stay. But if those tests are negative, then that is a wholly different situation and you feel there is more of a chance that those games could have and should have gone ahead.
https://www.skysports.com/cricket/n...ds-odi-series-in-south-africa-being-postponed
) 
