IPL 2023 is anticipated to start on April 1 and the inaugural Women’s IPL season is anticipated to run from March 3 to 26. Both competitions will take place in India. The WIPL will begin a week after the 2023 Women’s T20 World Cup final, which is planned to take place on February 26 in Cape Town, even though the BCCI has not yet finalised the dates.
When it comes to the IPL, ESPNcricinfo has gathered that the BCCI is determining the availability of foreign players before deciding on the tournament’s conclusion date. The 10-team event will resume its home-and-away structure after being postponed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic’s restrictions. The BCCI would probably aim to finish up the IPL by the end of May because England and Ireland will play one final Test at Lord’s from June 1 to 4. The second ICC World Test Championship final will take place at The Oval a few days later; India has a chance to compete. The Ashes start on June 16 at that time.
The media-rights tender for the first five seasons of the WIPL, 2023 to 2027, was announced by the BCCI on Friday. Although December 31, 2022, is the deadline for picking up the tender, it has been discovered that the bids will be opened around January 8. The BCCI has chosen to use the closed-bid procedure rather than an online auction. It is discovered that the BCCI has not established a starting price for any of the three categories for which rights will be sold: television, digital, and a combination of the two. More information will become available once the bidders receive the tender document.
The BCCI communicated a strategy for the WIPL with its members, the state associations, in October of this year. This plan was approved during the board’s Annual General Meeting.
Five franchise clubs will compete in the league, and they will play a total of 22 games. Each squad may have a maximum of 18 players, including a maximum of six foreign players, and each starting XI may include a maximum of five foreign players (four from Full Member countries and one from an Associate nation).
Each team will play the other twice (for a total of 20 matches) during the league stage of the WIPL, and the team with the best record advances directly to the championship game. The second finalist will be decided by a game between the league’s second- and third-place clubs.
The process will then move on to inviting bids for the five franchises, according per the BCCI’s deadlines. The BCCI has created two original designs for the WIPL, in contrast to the men’s IPL, which allows franchises to bid for teams in a certain city. The first one involved selling teams throughout six different zones of the nation. Dharamsala/Jammu (North zone), Pune/Rajkot (West), Indore/Nagpur/Raipur (Central), Ranchi/Cuttack (East), Kochi/Visakhapatnam (South), and Guwahati are among the cities in each zone that have been shortlisted (North-East).
The second strategy involves selling teams without providing them with a stable home base and scheduling games at six IPL locations that have been shortlisted: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai.
The BCCI has not decided whether the squad assembling would be done through an auction or a draught, which is the last step in the procedure. The WIPL’s potential conflict with the Women’s Pakistan Super League’s inaugural season will keep player availability in mind (WPSL). The WPSL final will take place on March 18, while the PCB has not yet made public a precise schedule for the competition.