The wait for the highly anticipated Women’s Indian Premier League (W-IPL) officially comes to an end as it now is in the public domain in form of a media release by the Board of Control for Control in India (BCCI) that, “The General Body approved to conduct the Women’s Indian Premier League.”
The quote was a highlight from the BCCI’s 91st Annual General meeting that was held on the 18th of October, 2022 in Mumbai. As reported earlier, it’s understood that the BCCI has reserved a window in March 2023 for the inaugural edition of the women’s IPL.
The BCCI reportedly is in plans for a 5-team tournament and initially, it was learnt that the current franchises in the Indian Premier League (IPL) will be given the first right of refusal, but it now is understood that the BCCI is planning on staging an auction for its five official franchises.
In a media byte to ANI, BCCI’s vice-president, Mr Rajeev Shukla said, “We have in principle decided to start women’s IPL. IPL governing council was asked to finalize the details for the same. Franchise auction and all other things will be decided in some time.”
The franchises are likely to be allowed to field in 5 overseas players in each playing XI and out of those 5, a maximum of 4 can be from the International Cricket Council’s (ICC’s) full member nations, while the lone remaining slot can be filled by a player from the associate nations. On the players’ front, it’s understood that there’ll not be an auction instead, there’ll be a draft process in place.
The 5 sides are expected to play the other twice in a round-robin format which will bring to us 20 fixtures. The team finishing at the top of the points table will directly qualify for the final and the 2nd and 3rd seeded teams will qualify via the knockouts. With only 20 league games in consideration, the venue for the league stage is likely to be one and the teams advancing for the knockouts would be traveling to a different venue to close out the tournament.
On selling of IPL teams, it’s understood that the board is debating between two options of selling the IPL teams: Zone wise; North (Dharamsala/Jammu), South (Kochi/Vizag), Central (Indore/Nagpur/Raipur), East (Ranchi/Cuttack), North East (Guwahati) and West (Pune/Rajkot) with matches held at non-IPL venues) and existing city wise like with Men’s IPL (Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata, matches held at IPL venues).
(Quote sourced from ANI and Cricbuzz)
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