After a successful Test leg against Australia and England at home, the women’s cricket is set to get a huge domestic boost in red-ball cricket. As per a report in the Indian Express, the BCCI has decided to start red-ball season in March-April, after a gap of almost six years, with the last first-class season happening in 2018.
The report further suggests that the BCCI is planning to start the season after the WPL, which will begin in Delhi and Bengaluru from February 22. For now, it might just be restricted to a zonal tournament, but later will be changed into Ranji-like format.
“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.
Meanwhile, earlier Diana Edulji had said, it was important to revive the domestic tournament, in women’s game.
“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.
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“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.”
