The International Cricket Council (ICC) is conducting its meeting in Kolkata amidst the ongoing IPL. The meeting has been convened to discuss and finalize important present and future decision that will impact cricket. One of the important decision to come out today has been regarding granting the T20I status to the member nations.
ICC has decided to grant the T20I status to all the male and female teams of 104 member nations. As of now, 18 teams share the privilege of being T20I teams. Now ICC will add the remaining nations in the same club thus making these matches count as T20I matches rather than list-A.
out of the current 18 teams, 12 are the Test playing nations which are permanent members of ICC. These include the recent entrants Afghanistan and Ireland. Apart from these the remaining six teams have a temporary status till the 2022 Qualifier tournament. After the Qualifying tournament, the status shall either be retained or lost.
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The six teams as of now consist of Scotland, Nepal, UAE, Netherlands, Hong Kong and Oman. Now with all other teams getting the T20I status gets all of them on an equal footing. All women’s matches shall be T20I after 1st July 2018 while all men’s matches will have the international status from 1st January 2019.
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Other few issues apart from these have also been discussed. Notable ones are stricter punishments for the incidents like the sandpaper gate, discussions regarding the blossoming of the newer T20 league around the world and how to keep them away from clashing with international matches.
NO MORE CHAMPIONS TROPHY
ICC has also decided to do away with the Champion’s Trophy that was scheduled to take place in India in 2021, It shall be replaced by World T20. There is already one WT20 tournament that will be played in Australia. This one in 2021 will mean the tournament being played in consecutive years. If the Champions Trophy is not played after this, Pakistan will go down in history at the last winner of the knockout tournament.
