Browne-john hails new dates for Women’s World T20

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) — Chief West Indies Women’s selector Ann Browne-john said she welcomed the decision to push back the International Cricket Council (ICC) Women’s Twenty20 World Cup (WWT20) to 2023. Cricket’s World governing body, the ICC, said this past week that the tournament will be contested from February 9 to 26, 2023. “I saw the decision and I could understand the rationale for it, because with the COVID-19 everything has been pushed back…i think it is a good decision,” Brownejohn told the Trinidad Newsday newspaper. “I understand it and I think it will be something that the players will gladly accept.” The move follows the decision in August to postpone the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup 2021 to 2022, meaning there would be three major events in 2022. There will be a women’s T20 competition at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games in July that year and the WWT20 was originally scheduled to be held in November 2022. ICC chief executive Manu Sawhney said since there were currently no major women’s events scheduled to take place in 2023, the World governing body agreed to switch for the WWT20 to better support player preparation and to continue to build the momentum around the women’s game beyond 2022. Browne-john said she did not think staging three World tournaments in one year would have affected the standard of the cricket, but there are a number of benefits to the new schedule. “Once players go to a tournament they would play to the best of their ability, but I think that staggering the tournaments [will] give them enough time between each tournament to recover and then go on to the following tournament,” she said.