Cricket lost a chunk of the year’s fixtures, including a World Cup which had to be postponed, and players were banished to a life in “luxury prisons” when the game staggered back onto its feet still bearing the scars of the Covid-19 pandemic.The sweet sound of bat meeting ball fell silent in March when New Zealand were renewing their trans-Tasman rivalry in Australia and the Pakistan Super League Twenty20 competition was nearing its business end.The novel coronavirus outbreak forced players indoors, leaving several cricket boards, including some of the more affluent ones, in the red.Half a dozen test series could not be played, creating a calendar logjam and forcing a change to how the finalists for next year’s World Test Championship (WTC) would be determined.The women’s Twenty20 World Cup, which Meg Lanning’s Australia clinched on March 8 before a record 86,000-plus crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, had a narrow escape but the men’s tournament was not so lucky.Even as the pandemic raged on, the governing International Cricket Council (ICC) waited until July before postponing the Australia edition of the tournament to 2022.While the game endured a rare four-month lull, boards introduced cost-cutting measures to deal with the pandemic’s financial aftermath.Several boards, including Cricket Australia, furloughed the lion’s share of their workforce, while the England and Wales Cricket Board narrowly escaped what its chief executive Tom Harrison later described as “financial oblivion”.The ECB postponed the inaugural edition of The Hundred competition, while their players, men and women, accepted pay cuts.