International Cricket Council (ICC) have announced the Women’s regional qualifiers dates for qualification pathway towards 2023 ICC Women’s T20 World Cup. Samoa will be hosting the East Asia-Pacific region qualifiers from September 03rd – 08th, 2021.
Samoa will host Women’s squads from Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, Cook Islands, Indonesia, Japan and Philippines in the 8-nation tournament, from which the top team will qualify for the global qualifiers, and there will be opportunity for the team finishing second as well, as the final position in the 8-nation global qualifiers will be filled by the highest ranked team in the regional qualifiers on the November cut-off date, who missed out on topping their regional event table.
The five regions (Asia, Africa, Americas, Europe and East Asia-Pacific) will host a regional qualifying event with the top team from each region joining the bottom two ranked teams in the Women’s T20I Rankings as of 30 November 2021 – from the teams that competed at the Australia 2020 event – into the eight-team ICC Women’s T20 World Cup Qualifier 2022.
Papua New Guinea were the winners from the 2019 edition of the EAP qualifiers hosted by Vanuatu, while the 2020 edition will see the return of Cook Islands team in the qualifiers for the first time since their appearances in 2012 and 2014, while Philippines will be making their debut in an ICC Women’s event for the first time. Most of the teams in the competition met each other in Samoa in 2019 during the Pacific games and the experience of playing in the similar conditions will be handy for the likes of Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa.
The ICC Board has approved a detailed COVID-19 contingency plan in consultation with the ICC Medical Committee for all ICC Qualifying Events. The ICC’s priority is the protection and well-being of everyone involved in its events. Plans have been developed, which detail on-going risk management processes to monitor and mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all hosts and participants.
