MUMBAI: The IPL 2023 season is scheduled to start on April 1 while the inaugural Women’s IPL season is anticipated to run from March 3 to 26. Both competitions will take place in India.
While the BCCI has not yet finalised the calendar, it has set a window for the WIPL, which will begin one week after the 2023 Women’s T20 World Cup final, which will take place on February 2 in Cape Town.
As per ESPNcricinfo, with regard to the IPL, the BCCI is determining the availability of foreign players before deciding on the tournament’s conclusion date. The 10-team event will resume its home-and-away structure after being postponed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic’s restrictions.
The BCCI will probably aim to finish up the IPL by the end of May because England and Ireland will play one final Test at Lord’s from June 1 to 4. The second ICC World Test Championship final will take place at The Oval a few days later; India has a chance to compete. The Ashes start on June 16 at that time.
Media-rights tender for the first five seasons of the WIPL, 2023 to 2027, was announced by the BCCI on Friday. Although December 31, 2022, is the deadline for picking up the tender, it has been come to light that the bids will be opened around January 8.
The BCCI has chosen to use the closed-bid procedure rather than an online auction. It is believed that the BCCI has not established a starting price for any of the three categories for which rights will be sold — television, digital, and a combination of the two. More information will become available once the bidders receive the tender document.
The BCCI submitted a strategy for the WIPL with its members, the state associations, in October of this year. This plan was approved at the board’s Annual General Meeting.
The proposal calls for five franchise teams to play a total of 22 games in order to compete in the league. Each squad may have a maximum of 18 players, including a maximum of six foreign players, and each starting XI may include a maximum of five foreign players (four from full-member countries and one from an associate nation).
Each team will play the other twice (for a total of 20 matches) during the league stage of the WIPL, and the team with the best record advances directly to the championship game. The second finalist will be decided by a game between the league’s second- and third-place clubs. The process will then move on to inviting bids for the five franchises, according per the BCCI’s deadlines.
The BCCI has created two original designs for the WIPL, in contrast to the men’s IPL, which allows franchises to bid for teams in a certain city. The first one involved selling teams throughout six different zones of the nation — Dharamsala/Jammu (North zone), Pune/Rajkot (West), Indore/Nagpur/Raipur (Central), Ranchi/Cuttack (East), Kochi/Visakhapatnam (South), and Guwahati are among the cities in each zone that have been shortlisted (North-East).
The second strategy entails selling teams without providing them with a stable home base and scheduling games at six IPL locations that have been shortlisted — Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai.
The BCCI has not decided whether the squad assembling will be done through an auction or a draft, which is the last step in the procedure. The WPSL final will take place on March 18, while the PCB has not yet made public a precise schedule for the competition. (ANI)