- Tuesday, April 23, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE upcoming World Cup in women’s 50-over cricket will go ahead as per schedule across six venues in New Zealand starting March 4, tournament chief executive officer Andrea Nelson has said.
On Sunday (23), New Zealand’s bilateral series for the rest of the season were shifted to a condensed list of grounds in the wake of the community outbreak of the Omicron variant that put the island-nation under enhanced Covid-19 restrictions.
“We did look at multiple contingency plans over the last 12 months as you can well imagine. But the plan is to retain the schedule as it is with the six venues. The contingency measures we’re putting in place relate to kind of partaking the travel between those venues as much as possible,” Nelson was quoted as saying by ESPNcricinfo.
“One of the factors [of hosting a multi-team cricket event] in New Zealand is that our venues are very different to, for example, some of the venues in the subcontinent or the UK. For those that have watched cricket in New Zealand, we’ve got grass-bank stadiums, [and] smaller stadiums that don’t have hotels built into them. So it’s a very different environment to how some of it has been staged recently,” she added.
The six venues that are scheduled to host the matches are Mount Maunganui, Dunedin, Wellington, Auckland, Hamilton and Christchurch.
The tournament will kick off in Mount Maunganui on March 4 and the final will be played in Christchurch on April 3. Eight teams are taking part in the tournament and each of them will play the other before the top four teams advance to the semi-finals.
“In terms of the delivery of the event for the players, it has not brought about any changes because we had been planning alongside the ICC for the safest possible tournament. So there are no significant changes to the way we deliver it for the players. Predominantly, the changes are related to the spectators inside the stadium,” Nelson said.
“New Zealand has moved to a traffic-light system… And broadly speaking, that puts at the moment attendance [which] can be only in groups of 100. So the work we’re undertaking at the moment is how many groups of 100 can we fit within each stadium. And we’re working through a bit of detail on all that … But really, the message is: we set out to kind of create a fantastic platform for these athletes to perform on, and we remain fully committed to doing that,” she added.
On Thursday, New Zealand Cricket made several changes over venues for its upcoming international season to reduce risks of exposure to the Omicron variant.
All the six limited-over matches (five one-day matches and one T20 international) that the New Zealand eves are set to play against their Indian counterparts in February were moved to one venue, which is John Davies Oval in Queenstown, Otago.
Earlier, McLean Park in Napier was to host the one-off T20 international and the opening one-day international, the Saxton Oval in Nelson was slated to stage the second and third one-day internationals while the final two one-day matches were to be played in Queenstown.
