Indian men, women's team set to lock horns with South Africa in double header T20 games, confirms the BCCI

The Indian men’s team and the women’s team are all set to play three doubleheader T20 internationals in South Africa in the beginning of 2018. The news was confirmed when the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) accepted Cricket South Africa’s proposal on the same.

Virat Kohli and his men are scheduled to travel to South Africa in January next year to engage themselves in a full fledged series stretching over all formats. According to reports from the Indian Express, the women’s team will also be touring South Africa for a bilateral series as per a BCCI sources.

What the sources had to say:

“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,” sources said.

The BCCI has taken a similar initiative before in the year of 2015 when the board had arranged 3 similar double header matches against Australia. It is expected that the women’s T20 games will be telecasted live on television.

Women’s team heavyweights Jhulan Goswami and Mithali Raj drew out a road map for women’s cricket in the country a few weeks ago in a meeting. The duo demanded an increase in the number of overseas games and bilateral series against foreign teams at home apart from the domestic matches which were also asked to be increased.

They had also insisted on the formation of a women’s A team to which the BCCI gave a nod. But their wish for a women’s IPL  still remains a distant dream after the board mentioned that it is not practically possible at the moment.

“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,” Clare Connor, ECB’s director of women’s cricket, had said early this year.