The Pakistan Women’s T20 League, which was slated to take place next month with the eighth season of the Pakistan Super League, will not take place as planned. Instead, it has been pushed out to September 2023 and will be conducted as a distinct organisation with a different identity and name than the Men’s PSL.
The league was postponed on the advice of the new PCB administration committee, chaired by Najam Sethi. The new league, which will go by a different name, will have four teams and will be a separate tournament. Former chairman Ramiz Raja devised the idea for the women’s T20 league, which was planned to run concurrently with PSL matches in Rawalpindi.
Ramiz was a major proponent of beginning tournaments at the youth level and sought to make women’s cricket more profitable by establishing a franchise-based league. It was also a bad commercial decision to have the women’s PSL on the same dates as the women’s IPL’s first season, which is scheduled for March 2023.
Because to the shift in the PCB’s management, the PSL governing council felt that the women’s league was impracticable at this stage in the season. However, the PCB will continue to investigate league options. There were discussions of hosting a few exhibition games as a test case during the men’s PSL, but this idea was eventually abandoned.
According to reports, owing to a shortage of finance, the PCB administration was unwilling to pursue this notion. Instead, they want to enhance infrastructure expenditure in order to increase the number of available players around the country. However, after considerable deliberation, it was agreed to conduct a separate competition from the men’s PSL, which would take place in two sites.
Making teams with enough seasoned players from the local pool will be one of the PCB’s major challenges. In Pakistan, there are just a few female cricketers, with approximately 30-35 of them playing at the senior level. Pakistan’s domestic cricket circuit consists of the National T20 and ODI Challenge Cups, which each include three teams.
A huge number of cricketers were recruited via trials before to the present Under-19 Women’s T20 World Cup, however, the group is still relatively young and in its early phases. Lahore Qalandars has extended its Player Development Program to include female cricketers in an attempt to enhance the number of players in Pakistan. They might become a source for the league since they already have a group of more than 20 female cricketers under their care at their high-performance programme.
