If everything goes according to the current plan than it will be the first time in history when two Indian senior men’s cricket teams will play at the same time at different venues. We can observe this rarest incident when India will tour in Australia this November.
Almost in the two-month long Australia tour, India will play three-match T20I series, four-match Test series and three-match ODI series against the hosts from 21 November 2018 to 18 January 2019.
India will start their Australia tour through the T20I series that have been scheduled November 21, 23 and 25. Meanwhile, the next Test series will begin from December 6. Prior to the Test series, India may play two warm-up matches. According to a report by The Mumbai Mirror, the warm-up matches can be played simultaneously with the T20I series. It means, some regular Indian players will surely miss any one of those matches.
In 2017, similar kind of incident happened with Australian cricket. While Australia started to play their four-match Test series against the hosts India from February 23, 2017, another Australian team played their last T20I of three-match home T20I series against Sri Lanka on February 22, 2017. In fact, the whole Australian away Test squad missed the entire home T20I series as the first two T20Is (February 17 and 19, 2017) ran simultaneously with the three-day away warm-up game in India.
However, Cricket Australia (CA) managed that very well as they set two completely different national teams for those series. Now, we have to watch how the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) reacts this.
However, there are only one incident happened when a team played two different international cricket matches simultaneously in the different venues. The team was England and that rarest incident happened in February 1930, when one English Test team played against West Indies at Georgetown and another English Test team played against New Zealand at Auckland simultaneously that ran for less than two hours.
Though two Tests of both series were scheduled on the exact same dates, due to the different time zones, it happened only once when two different English teams played Test matches simultaneously. When the day 2 started (22 February) in the New Zealand Test, the last session of the first day was still running in the West Indies (21 February). Till the date, it is the only incident in international cricket history when a team played two different international cricket matches simultaneously in the different venues.
