USA First-Time Co-Host of T20 World Cup-2024: New York to Buzz with Cricket!

Announcing the confirmed complete schedule of the forthcoming ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup-2024, the International Cricket Council has expressed its happiness at the expansion of the tournament with never-before 20 cricket nations participating and the United States of America coming in as a co-host, the first time ever for a manor ICC event. Referring to America as the biggest sports market the ICC said that this would provide a huge stimulus to world cricket in the coming years. The 9^th version of T20 World Cup is set to kick off on June 1^st in New York and conclude with the Final to be played in Barbados on 29^th of the same month, the West Indies being the other co-host. The tournament, divided into four groups of five teams each, will have 55 matches in all out of which 16 league matches are to be played in the USA, and 8 out of 16 to be staged at the 34,000-capacity new modular cricket stadium coming up at the Nassau County, Long Island, New York, including the blockbuster India-Pakistan encounter on 9^th June. Team India is placed in Group-A along with Pakistan, Canada, Ireland and the hosts. Top two teams from each group will make it to the Super-8 which is further divided into two groups and the top two teams from each group will make it to the knockout stage. All Super-8 and knockout matches are to be played in the West Indies.

The other two USA venues are Dallas and Lauderhill, Florida. The tournament opener will be played between USA and Canada in Dallas on 1^st June 2024. While the USA, Canada, India, Pakistan and Ireland are to play all their league matches in the USA, a few matches featuring South Africa, Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and Nepal are also to be played there. The rest of the teams will be based in the West Indies for all their league plus Super Eight matches that are to be played in the six venues there: Guyana, Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Barbados. The group-stage league matches are scheduled during 1-18 June, the Super Eight encounters from June 19 to June 24, the two semi-finals are on 26^th and the 27^th in Guyana and Trinidad respectively and the Final on 29^th June in Barbados.

The League Stage—20 Teams:

Group A: India, Pakistan, Ireland, Canada, USA

Group B: England, Australia, Namibia, Scotland, Oman

Group C: New Zealand, West Indies, Afghanistan, Uganda, Papua New Guinea

Group D: South Africa, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Netherlands, Nepal

The Americas are always known to us as the centerstage for soccer and tennis, apart from their excellence in Olympics sports. However, cricket used to be immensely popular there in the past till baseball took over in terms of popularity. And now, the reverse seems to be happening—baseball losing it and cricket gaining back popularity at a fast rate. The huge chunk of the South Asian immigrants there, the cricket leagues and the live cricket streaming platforms are largely among the factors to establish cricket as a major sport in the Americas, which is all very promising for the future of this money-spinning game as we mentioned earlier. This assumes more significance as Cricket returns to the Olympics after 128 years and for the fact that Olympics-2028 is going to take place in Los Angeles, USA. With the USA being one of the hosts for the T20 World Cup-2024, LA28 is set to further expand cricket not only in the Americas, but across the globe.

Having said all that, the format of the T20 World Cup-2024 remains disappointing: it’s too many groups all the way, except for just three knockout matches which basically means that nearly half of the twenty teams are never going to face each other. The round-robin format adopted in the one-day World Cup should have been there at least in the Super Eight stage of the tournament. In a genuine international event involving twenty cricket nations there are only 55 matches in all to be played in a period less than a month while the famed IPL features 74 matches for just 10 franchises, consuming around two months. The ICC should realistically rearrange its calendar to heighten the spirit of competition among cricket loving nations.