Inaugural Women's IPL season likely to take place from March 3 to 26: Report

The Women's IPL will be played prior to the men's tournament.

The inaugural Women's IPL season is likely to take place in India from March 3 to 26, prior to the men’s tournament, expected to start on April 1.

While the BCCI is yet to finalise the calendar, it has outlined a window for the WIPL, which will get underway one week after the 2023 Women's T20 World Cup final, which will be held in Cape Town on February 26.

According to ESPNcricinfo, BCCI is determining the availability of foreign players before taking a call on the men’s IPL final. The tournament will return to its home-and-away structure after being postponed owing to the Covid-19 restrictions.

As per the report, the BCCI aims to finish up the IPL in the last week of May because England and Ireland will play one final Test at Lord's from June 1 to 4 while the WTC 2023 final will take place at The Oval some days later.

Currently occupying fourth spot in the WTC standings, Team India have a chance to compete in the final.

Earlier this year, BCCI submitted a strategy for the WIPL with its members. This proposal was approved at the board's Annual General Meeting.

The proposal calls for five franchise teams to play a total of 22 games in order to compete in the league. Each squad may have a maximum of 18 players, including a maximum of six foreign players, and each starting XI may include a maximum of five foreign players (four from Full Member countries and one from an Associate nation).

Each team will play the other twice (for a total of 20 matches) during the league stage of the WIPL, and the team with the best record advances directly to the championship game. The second finalist will be decided by a game between the league's second- and third-place clubs.

The BCCI has set out two models for the WIPL, in contrast to the men's IPL, which allows franchises to bid for teams in a certain city. The first one involved selling teams throughout six different zones of the nation. Dharamsala/Jammu (North zone), Pune/Rajkot (West), Indore/Nagpur/Raipur (Central), Ranchi/Cuttack (East), Kochi/Visakhapatnam (South), and Guwahati are among the cities in each zone that have been shortlisted (North-East).

The second model involves selling teams without providing them a stable home base and scheduling games at six IPL locations that have been shortlisted as Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai.

BCCI has not taken a call on whether the squad assembling would be done by means of an auction or a draft, which is the last step in the process.

(With ANI inputs)