Onus on the individual: the pandemic has changed the rules

Luckily for Pant and India, there is time enough for the player to recover before the first Test on August 4

The temptation must have been difficult to resist. Here’s a young man, an international sportsman, with a chance of watching the kind of football he will not get back home. There might have been a residual fear about what could happen in cheering, screaming crowds after what happened in similar situations during a cricket series in India. But this is England, the rules are different, and what are the odds anyway? Rishabh Pant may not have worked it out thus. But as a key player in the series to follow, he should have been aware of the risk he was taking when he decided to go — sans mask, it appears — to the England-Germany Euro 2020 match at Wembley. Or if he didn’t, the Board of Control for Cricket in India should have alerted him to it.