BCCI To Start Women's Red-Ball Competition After WPL 2024 - Reports

Eyeing the Indian women’s cricket team’s success in the two one-off Tests against Australia and England, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is willing to start red ball domestic competitions for women post-WPL 2024. This was reported by the Indian news agency Indian Express. BCCI has not organized a single multi-day sporting event for women since 2018.

The richest cricket board in the world conducts white ball domestic competitions for women every year and also started with the Women’s Premier League last year just like the IPL for men. As per the report, BCCI is expected to start with the women’s multi-day domestic competition in March and April.

For the beginning, BCCI is likely to start with zonal competitions in this domestic season whereas, moving forward they will look into organizing a tournament like the men’s Ranji Trophy. The zonal selectors will pick the players and the tournament can be expected to be of three days with the final being a four-day event.

BCCI to start red ball competition for women: Reports

A BCCI official while speaking to Indian Express said, “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.”

Many cricket boards in the world do not have any domestic red-ball competition for women whereas only India, Australia, and England are seen playing red-ball cricket.

Women’s cricket in India has grown very much in the last few years as the performance of the Indian stars has also been brilliant on the world stage. India have played Tests against Australia and England on their home soil and also gave tough competitions to the two giants of women’s cricket.

After Australia and England, India are seen to be the third biggest team in women’s cricket currently. Cricketers such as Smriti Mandhana, Jemimah Rodrigues, Deepti Sharma, Shafali Varma, and skipper Harmanpreet Kaur are some of the top players of the present Indian women’s cricket team.

With the start of the Women’s Premier League, many other talented women cricketers such as Shreyanka Patil and Saika Ishaque came into the limelight and they are some of the highly talented Indian women cricketers who will surely take the team forward.

India have also performed brilliantly in the last few ICC tournaments, which include the final of the 2017 ODI World Cup and the 2018 T20 World Cup. India also qualified for the final of the Commonwealth Games 2022 and the T20 World Cup 2023. However, in all these tournaments, India have not been able to win a single trophy.

Though, India won gold in the 2023 Asian Games and they probably have the character to win an ICC trophy as well. However, India would now want to focus on the upcoming editions of the T20 World Cup and ODI World Cup and will want to break that knockout barrier and win their maiden ICC title.