India men, women to play back-to-back 3 T20I matches in South Africa next year

A lot has been spoken and discussed about women s cricket walking hand-in-hand with men s. The Indian Board seem to be making the necessary changes on this thought and have agreed for double-header proposed by Cricket South Africa (CSA) next year. India will be touring South Africa anyway next year. This time the women s team would also be tagging along. This is not the first time such an initiative has been put in place. In 2015, BCCI had organised three double-headers against Australia.

West Indies team were there to cheer their women counterparts and the vice versa happened for the men's match during the final of ICC T20 World Cup 2016. Those matches were shown live and these matches will also be televised. Jhulan Goswami and Mithali Raj had a meeting with the board to discuss the road ahead for women s cricket.

Confirming the news to Indian Express, the BCCI official said, They had requested us and we have accepted their proposal. It will help women s team a lot and the matches will be shown live too. It will be played on the same stadium before India games. The BCCI is planning to have similar kind of activity for women s in future too. There will be more India A games for women s team in future. Mithali and Jhulan wanted more of international cricket than just domestic matches. One of the suggestions was to have India A women s team as well, which BCCI seems to have agreed upon.

However, the chances of a women s IPL looks bleak given the financial crunch and internal problems within BCCI.

With the double-headers catching up, Clare Connor, ECB s Director of women s cricket said, To have men and women playing on the same pitch, shown on the same TV channel, with the same commentary team, is part of this normalising process that we re all trying to speed up as quickly as we can.