Among few players who tested positive during the now-postponed IPL 2021, Kolkata Knight Riders's Kiwi player Tim Seifert could not hold back in tears when he recalled the times he tested COVID-19 positive and all negative thoughts crept into his head.
Seifert was the third player from the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) camp to test positive for Covid-19. Varun Chakravarthy and Sandeep Warrier were the other two players who contracted the virus in the KKR camp.
Aftert the IPL was postponed on May 2, most of the overseas players left the country with rising number of COVID-19 cases in India. However, Seifert had to stay back in India for a longer period and showed moderate symptoms of the contagion as well as he recalled CSK manager inform him of testing positive.
“The Chennai Super Kings manager showed me the positive on the top of the test. The world stops and I just couldn’t really think what was next and that was the scariest part of it – you hear about the bad things and I thought that was going to happen to me,” said Seifert during a media interaction on New Zealand cricket team's Twitter handle.
Seifert finally returned to New Zealand last week and is currently undergoing 14-day isolation in a hotel.
Seifert said he was grateful to KKR coach Brandon McCullum and CSK coach Stephen Fleming for extending their support during the period.
"They made everything a lot easier. They made sure that things would be put in place and the CSK management and CEO of Kolkata Knight Riders [the team Seifert played for], they made life easy for me to know that everything would be alright and when that time was to come home, they'd try everything to get me home safely," he added.