MUMBAI: With the Indian cricket board looking at March 2023 as the tentative time frame for the inaugural edition of the Women’s Indian Premier League (WIPL), the BCCI is reportedly planning for five franchises contesting in a 20-game debut season.
Cricbuzz reports that a final decision regarding the same will be taken after the new board takes over early next week.
The five franchises, which have already garnered interest among existing IPL franchise owners, are slated to play each other five times in a round-robin format.
The team finishing atop the league stage will directly qualify for the final, while the second and third-placed sides are touted to play an Eliminator.
The outlined format will give rise to 20 fixtures in WIPL 2023, for which the BCCI are considering using two venues. The tournament will initially be set up at one venue before they switch up venues for the latter half of the season.
A similar itinerary was employed for the first-half of the IPL 2021 season. Teams were split into groups with the initial set of matches being played in Mumbai and Chennai.
The tentative window for the WIPL is between the Women’s T20 World Cup 2023 and the 2023 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL).
According to Cricbuzz, the BCCI is exploring the possibility of allowing franchises to field up to five overseas players in their playing 11. Out of those five players, up to four can be from ICC full member nations, with the remaining slot open for players from associate nations.
The report also mentions that BCCI is planning to sell the franchises either zone-wise or city-wise. It reads: “The board is also 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 the IPL (Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata – with matches held at IPL venues).”
