Former India captain Kapil Dev has called for a balanced approach for families on the tours of the Indian team. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) implemented stringent policies for families on India’s tours after the Men in Blue suffered a 1-3 loss to Australia in the Border-Gavaskar series.
Kapil highlighted the importance of family and team time during the tours. “Well, I don’t know, that’s individual. I think it’s the cricket board’s call,” Kapil said on the sidelines of the ‘Kapil Dev Grant Thornton Invitational’ event.
“My view is, yes, you need family. But you also need a team, all the time. In our time, we used to say to ourselves — not by the cricket board — that the first half of the tour should be cricket, and in the second half, the family should come and enjoy it too. It should be a blend,” said Kapil.
Recently, veteran batter Virat Kohli expressed his disappointment over the family rule of the BCCI. “It’s very difficult to explain to people how grounding it is to just come back to your family every time you have something which is intense, which happens on the outside,” Kohli said during the RCB Innovational Lab Indian Sports Summit.
“If you ask any player, do you want your family to be around you all the time? You’ll be like, yes. I don’t want to go to my room and just sit alone and sulk. I want to be able to be normal. And then you can really treat your game as something that is a responsibility. You finish that responsibility, and you come back to life,” he added.
According to the BCCI rule, families can stay with the players on tours of 45 days or more for no more than 14 days and not at all during the first two weeks. For shorter tours, the families can spend the time with players for up to a week.
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