The three-Test series will be the first time Australia have played a red-ball match in South Africa since the 2018 ball-tampering scandal.
The tour has been complicated by another wave of COVID-19 in South Africa. The nation has recorded more than one million cases and 40,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Sean Abbott would rather be on the bench in South Africa than playing in the T20 series in New Zealand.Credit:Getty
Cricket Australia received backlash from the general public, as well as the chair of Australian cricket’s players’ union Greg Dyer, after applying to the federal government for Test players to skip to the front of the vaccine queue to help the tour go ahead.
In the application, CA’s chief medical officer Dr John Orchard asked the nation’s chief medical officer Paul Kelly whether it was possible to have the squad vaccinated before its February 24 departure date.
Expressing a personal view rather than that of the Australian Cricketers Association, Dyer said he believed it was “morally indefensible” for sportspeople to be given priority ahead of higher-risk groups.
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Abbott said he would happily take the vaccine if it meant the tour could go ahead, and said there were some “concerns” in the camp about tour safety.
“If the doctor tells me it’s all safe and I need to get it to go and play Test cricket, that’s fine. I’ll obviously run it past my girlfriend to make sure she is OK with it as well,” he joked.
“They wouldn’t send us over there unless they were 100 per cent certain they could keep us safe.”
