International Cricket Council (ICC) have confirmed that the Men’s 2020 T20 World Cup, which was to be held in Australia in Oct/Nov 2020, has now been officially postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision was pending for couple of months now with many meeting taking place between ICC and multiple stakeholders during the period.
ICC, however is planning as scheduled for the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup 2021 in New Zealand in February next year. The Qualifiers for the event also needs to be rescheduled before that as the originally planned event in Jul 2020 in Sri Lanka has been postponed due to the pandemic. The IBC Board agreed to continue to monitor the rapidly changing situation and assess all the information available in order to make a considered decision on future hosts to ensure the sport is able to stage safe and successful global events in 2021 and 2022.
T20 World Cup/Cricket World Cup Reschedule Timeline
ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021 (Oct – Nov 2021) with the final on 14th Nov 2021
Considering that the 2020 edition will be held in 2021 in Australia, the five Associate qualifiers (Scotland, Netherlands, Namibia, Oman and Papua New Guinea) along with Ireland will have to wait for another year before taking part in the first round stage of the World Cup alongside Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2022 (Oct – Nov 2022) with the final on 13th Nov 2022
The sub-regional qualifiers in all the regions were scheduled to take place during 2020, which were postponed due to coronavirus lockdowns across the globe. Considering that the 2021 edition will be played in 2022, ICC will have ample time to reschedule the sub-regional and regional final qualifiers, and then reschedule the two set of global qualifiers after the completion of the 2021 T20 World Cup.
What needs to be kept in mind that in the new “normal”, 5-6 countries simply cannot travel to a neutral venue and start training and into the main competition within 2-3 days of their arrival in the specific country. All the sub-regional tournaments will see 6-8 teams at the same venue and need to go through the host country’s self-quarantine rules laid down by the respective governments before it is safe for the players and staff to resume training and then get into the tournament proper.
ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 will be held in India (Oct – Nov 2023) with the final on 26th Nov 2023
The ODI Super League, in which Netherlands will be participating along with the 12 Full members will see Ireland play England in the first of the 3-match series in Jul/Aug 2020. However, with pandemic relaxations not yet completely implemented in all the countries and many places seeing a surge of number increasing again, it is unlikely that all the host countries scheduled to have the Super League fixtures in 2020 will be able to complete the engagements and will most likely be postponed to 2021 and so forth.
The ICC CWC Leagues (League 2 and Challenge Leagues) events have also been postponed since Mar 2020 and those events will also need to be rescheduled. The League 2 involves Scotland, Papua New Guinea, Nepal, Namibia, Oman, USA and UAE, and while 5 set of Tri-series events out of the 21 scheduled are already completed, 4 events scheduled in the months of Apr-Jul are already postponed and very unlikely that the remaining ones set in 2020 will be played at this point of time and hence, a lot of events will need to be rescheduled and hence, travel logistics will come into the picture as well, to be in sync with regional qualifiers for T20 World Cup.
The same logic applies to the rescheduling of the ICC CWC Challenge League A & B events as well, with the first round out of three already completed but the second round for each have been postponed at this point of time. With 2021 and 2022 expected to host the majority of these tournaments and the Challenge League play-off and World Cup Qualifiers tournaments also requiring scheduling (most likely in 2023 itself), the postponement of the dates for the Cricket World Cup 2023 make complete sense.
Canada, Singapore, Denmark, Malaysia, Vanuatu and Qatar are part of CWC Challenge League A group, while Challenge League B group comprises of Hong Kong, Kenya, Uganda, Jersey, Bermuda and Italy. And with tours in 2020 and maybe in 2021 also requiring the traveling teams to go through the self-quarantine phases before resuming training and into the tournament proper, all the events in Super League, League 2 and Challenge Leagues will have a longer scheduling period than usual and hence, completing them in a hurry simply wont work and all the time between the remainder of 2020 and 2023 has to be scheduled carefully keeping the host country’s government rules and regulations for player and staff safety.
