Australian captain and pace bowler Mitchell Starc's wife, Alyssa Healy, who was in India for a few weeks to support her husband during the 2025 edition of the IPL, has recounted the events of the night of May 8 when the Punjab Kings vs Delhi Capitals match at the HPCA Stadium in Dharamsala was abandoned midway through. After 10.1 overs when the Kings lost their first wicket at the score of 122, the floodlights went off and earlier thought to be a technical failure, the stadium was quietly evacuated and the players and support staff were swiftly moved to their respective hotels.
The towns with proximity to the border, including Hoshiarpur, Amritsar, Pathankot, Srinagar and Jammu, after drones were spotted in the Jammu and Kashmir town, went under blackout. With the air-raid sirens and blackouts being observed in the nearby areas, the authorities had to think on their feet, which they did.
“It was a surreal experience. We were just sitting there, watching. They finally got a wicket, Delhi,” Healy told The Willow Talk podcast. "All of a sudden, a couple of the light towers went out and we were just sitting there up the top waiting… and I heard a rumour a couple of seats down that we might have to evacuate because obviously, the light's gone down. We’re a large group of family and extra support staff and the next minute, the guy who wrangles the group of us and gets us on the bus came up and his face was white.
“He was like, ‘we need to go right now’. Then (another) guy came out and his face was white and he grabbed one of the children and said, ‘we need to leave right now’. We were like, ‘what’s going on?’ We weren’t told anything. We had no idea. Next minute we are being shuffled into this room which was like a holding pen. All the boys were in there. Faf (du Plessis) didn’t even have shoes on. We were all just waiting there, looking stressed.
“I said to Mitch, ‘What’s going on?’ He said the town 60km away had just been smacked by some of the missiles so there was a complete blackout in the area. That’s why the lights were off, because the Dharamsala stadium was like a beacon at that point in time.
“All of a sudden we’re crammed into vans and off we go back to the hotel. There was madness," Healy said while mentioning that uncertainty and lack of information ate them up because the authorities didn't want to alert panic stations. Healy said that they somehow got some sleep for a few hours, which they needed to, as the next day was going to be a long one.
The entire contingent of both Punjab and Delhi teams, along with the commentators and the broadcast crew, took buses from Dharamsala to Una, a quaint town in Himachal Pradesh with rain connectivity and took a Vande Bharat train to Delhi before leaving for their respective towns and countries.
“We ended up going southwest towards the (Pakistan) border, which was a little bit terrifying, she said. “Mitch and I have played too much Call of Duty and we’re noticing all the (surface-to-missile) sites that were just sitting there ready to go. They’re radar-operated systems that shoot missiles at aircraft. (We saw) a few of them on the way through in some small towns," she added.
Thankfully, all of them reached safely and Healy mentioned that never did she or any of the players or their families felt unsafe. "There was anxiety and terrified at the same time, but I still feel like we would have been OK. We weren’t right in the firing line."
With the IPL set to resume, the PBKS vs DC match will be played again on May 24 in Jaipur.