BCCI to revive domestic red-ball for women’s team, expected to start post WPL 2024

After the Indian women’s cricket team played One-Off Test matches against England and Australia at home, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has decided to start women’s days cricket in the month of March-April. The richest cricket board in the world didn’t have any domestic multi-day events for women since 2018.

The Indian board regularly conducts white-ball cricket which includes one-day cricket and T20 at the domestic level and it was a few years ago they started age groups too.

The Indian Express understands that BCCI is mulling to start days cricket post Women’s Premier League (WPL) which is likely to be held from February 22 in Delhi and Bengaluru.

For starters, the BCCI is likely to have days cricket in zonal format this season and going ahead the Indian board might consider it to have a tournament like men’s Ranji Trophy. The zonal selectors will pick the zonal squad and a three-day league tournament will be conducted. The finals though will be a four-day affair.

“It will be a three-day tournament to start with. Due to the constraint of time we are thinking of starting with zonal format initially. The tournament will be concluded in the month of March-April. We don’t have red ball cricket for the women’s team (currently) and the BCCI felt it’s time to start day’s cricket as well as domestic cricket for womens,” a BCCI official confirmed to The Indian Express.

Most of the major cricketing boards around the world don’t have red-ball domestic cricket for women as Test matches are rare, with only India, Australia and England playing recently with some frequency.

According to statistician John Leather, India are the most recent to have had at least a days-cricket domestic event. “India briefly revived their multi-day women’s domestic cricket in the 2010s, playing 10 inter-zonal matches a season for four years from 2014/15 until 2017/18 (2-dayers in 2014/15 and 3-dayers in the other three seasons). The last such match was played in 2018. England hasn’t played any multi-day domestic matches since the Territorial tournament in 1991. While in Australia, the last multi-day women’s domestic cricket was the finals series of the Australian Women’s Cricket Championship (pre-cursor to the WNCL) in 1994/95,” Leather said.

Women’s cricket has grown in popularity at home since the past few years and more fans have turned up to watch the games. It was last year it started WPL and now the BCCI felt, it’s high time the board has a domestic championship so that women’s teams too have practice of red ball cricket. India had won both the Test matches against England and Australia by comfortable margins.

Former India captain Diana Edulji had told the Indian Express recently that it was imperative to revive these tournaments.

“The most important thing is to have a domestic three-day or four-day event,” Edulji had told the Indian Express. “I feel you learn the temperament to stay at the wicket by playing more of this format, it is not that in T20 you just swing your bat around for a while. Even there, you need to understand how to learn to spend time in the middle. When you play the longer formats more, you learn to play proper cricketing shots. We see this as a habit now in T20s, a lot of cross-bat shots which I am not in favour of. You take the likes of Virat, Rohit etc. They find the gaps in shorter formats with good shots, it’s because of their skillset. I request the BCCI to have at least one domestic tournament every year for the longer version. Skills will improve the more you play the longer version.”

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