The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has announced a special tour of Indian men’s and women’s team to South Africa. The two teams will face their South African counterparts in 3 doubleheader T20Is. Cricket South Africa (CSA) had proposed the idea to which BCCI gave the nod.
Indian men’s team is set to travel to South Africa next year in January to feature in the series across all formats. According to reports of the Indian Express, the women’s team will also tour the country as per a BCCI source.
“They had requested us and we have accepted their proposal. It will help women’s team a lot and the matches will be shown live too. It will be played on the same stadium before India games. The BCCI is planning to have similar kind of activity for women’s in future too. There will be more India A games for women’s team in future,” sources said.
The same had happened in the year 2015 as well when both the teams played 3 doubleheader T20Is in Australia. The women’s games will be telecasted as well which is bound to interest the viewers in both forms of the game on the same day.
Indian women’s team’s cricketers Jhulan Goswami and Mithali Raj had demanded an increase in the number of overseas games and bilateral series against foreign teams at home apart from the domestic matches which they also asked to increase. They had also requested for women’s A team to which the board had agreed upon.
“To have men and women playing on the same pitch, shown on the same TV channel, with the same commentary team, is part of this normalising process that we’re all trying to speed up as quickly as we can,” Clare Connor, ECB’s director of women’s cricket, had said early this year.
