With an unaccountable support and craze throughout the world, Cricket is one of the most loved and followed game. In addition to the general World Cup that is proceeded for every four years, new interesting formats of cricket are introduced, which includes The World Twenty20 Championship and Indian Premium League.
But, to everyone’s surprise, the seventh edition next year is all set to be scrapped and pushed to 2020 as the top member nations will be busy with bilateral commitments in 2018, the highly-placed sources in the International Cricket Council (ICC) claimed that the next edition of ICC World T2O will only be held in 2020 and the venue is yet to be decided accordingly.
A source from ICC was quoted reading:
“Yes, it is true that we are skipping with World T20 edition in 2018. Look, no venue was decided. The primary reason is there are too many bilateral series happening between member nations. It was not possible to schedule the tournament in 2018.”
Which in every regard says that the tournament will be returning in 2020.
“Yes, the tournament will return in 2020. It could be South Africa or Australia. The other reason apart from the bilateral series was that with too many ICC events on the anvil, the member nations were also of the view that it needed to be spaced out,” the source added.
Earlier, the most recent ICC World T20swere held in South Africa (2007), England (2009), West Indies (2010), Sri Lanka (2012), Bangladesh (2014), India (2016). Meanwhile, it was also clear that with almost all the member boards having their own franchise-based T20 leagues, the World T20 despite its popularity, won’t lose out on anything on its note.
The Bilateral series are always a better medium to spin enough money to all the nations as a plethora of broadcast deals are involved, this turns big if India visits any country to play, as the host member board earns millions of dollars through TV broadcast rights itself.
When questioned about the delay to be considered as a setback, the ICC boldly said:
“Not at all. There are enough T20 leagues and the fans will have a lot to look forward to.”
As of now, Team India is yet to participate in South Africa tour in 2018, followed by away series against England and Australia respectively and the next Champions Trophy scheduled in 2021 in India is still on.
On the other side, the main focuses for the upcoming ICC Annual Conference starting here from tomorrow will be getting the long-standing proposal for the World Test Championship, as ICC has long planned at least one world event across all formats.
And it is also believed that BCCI may request an increase in their share from the now proposed USD 390 million but member boards are unlikely to give in to their demands if they consider them unreasonable, just as it happened prior to the Champions Trophy.