CHENNAI: Forward Mandeep Singh became the sixth Indian international hockey player to test positive for COVID-19. The Karnataka state government informed the player that he had returned a positive test on Monday morning. "Mandeep Singh, a member of the Indian Men's Hockey team, who was given the Covid test (RT PCR) along with 20 other players at the National Camp at SAI's National Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru, has tested Covid positive, but is asymptomatic," a SAI press release said on Monday.
"He is being administered treatment by doctors, along with the other five players who have tested positive." The others, skipper Manpreet Singh, Jaskaran Singh, Varun Kumar, Krishan Pathak and Surender Kumar, are mildly symptomatic but are doing well at the moment.
Currently, there are no plans in place to postpone the national camp. The camp is supposed to begin at the SAI campus in Bengaluru from around the third week of August. "No conversations have taken place yet with respect to that," a source in the know said. This primarily means that once the other members of both the men's and women's teams finish their mandatory two-week quarantine, they will restart their training.
Men's Asian Champions Trophy could be postponed
Meanwhile, it's possible that the men's Asian Champions Trophy, currently scheduled to be held in Dhaka, could be postponed to 2021. "We are monitoring the situation regularly," a senior AHF official told this daily. "It is very likely that we change the dates considering the Covid-19 situation."
The dates for the tournament are from November 17-27. Considering there are more than 100000 active cases in Bangladesh, it could be moved to 2021 in all likelihood. If the AHF indeed does move the ACT to next year, there could be renewed focus on the fate of the camp. Because, as it stands, the men's team are not scheduled to play any official matches apart from the ACT this year.
The women's Asian Champions Trophy, originally slated to be held in June in South Korea, was one of the first tournaments to be moved to next year.