Coronavirus pandemic causes trouble in next year's schedule, ASB Classic Auckland won't go ahead in January

The pandemic hit the sports world hard especially tennis and it's causing trouble in next year's schedule as well as ASB Classic in Auckland won't go ahead in January.

It has been officially confirmed that the ASB Classic held in Auckland every January won't go ahead next year due to uncertainty with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Tournament director, Karl Budge, has said that decision has been made now because of the planning that would be required to stage the tournament.

“Yeah obviously an incredibly sad day for us. We thought we had a plan that was robust, but unfortunately there just not a pathway to a decision that we could have in the timeframes we needed and unfortunately that’s led to the pretty tough environment that we’re in today.”

As far as what pushed the organizers towards the decision to cancel the events they simply said a multitude of different reasons. Tennis Australia has previously said that any players entering the country will need to quarantine for 14 days withing a "bubble" environment. That created several logistical reasons for player's who would want to travel to New Zealand via Australia. Budge further said:

“It’s an incredibly complex situation. There’s no sort of one-off area that we met or didn’t meet. There’s a myriad of factors that we needed to work through. Unfortunately there just wasn’t the pathway to get to a point that any of us could have confidence that we could deliver what you need to deliver a tournament of our standing in a timeframe that would enable us to do it.”  

The controversy didn't stop there as there was some political fallout as well because of the situation. National Party candidates from the Auckland area were outraged with the cancellation claiming the event contributes 20 million to the local economy.

Despite the setback, Budge has vowed that the tournament will return stronger in the future:

“We’ve had incredible support from our sponsors (and) the team that we’ve got here that work tirelessly on trying to make a summer of tennis happen and I think we owe it to them to do everything that we possibly can to ensure that we return in 2022 and we return with a real statement."