DUBAI: The International Cricket Council (ICC) on Thursday confirmed the qualification process for the additional ICC Men’s T20 World Cup that will take place in 2021 in India.
The 16-team T20 World Cup 2021, which replaces a previously scheduled eight-team ICC Champions Trophy, will see 11 regional qualification events take place across the five ICC regions (Africa, Americas, Asia, East-Asia Pacific, and Europe) with eight teams progressing to one of two global qualifying events.
Additionally, the bottom four teams from the T20 World Cup 2020 will join the regional qualifiers in the global qualification events along with the next four best T20I ranked teams as of 1 January 2020: Zimbabwe, Nepal, UAE, and Hong Kong.
This means 16 teams will compete for four T20 World Cup spots in two global qualifiers with the top two teams from each progressing to the event proper in 2021. The 12 teams, which make round two of the ICC T20 World Cup 2020 in Australia will gain automatic entry into the event the following year.
ICC Head of Events Chris Tetley said: “The decision to replace the Champions Trophy with a T20 World Cup in 2021 was driven by our commitment to global growth and use T20 as our vehicle to do that. Of course, that presented us with a one-off qualification challenge.
“Our regional and global qualification pathways have been established and consistently provide compelling and competitive cricket and we didn’t want to lose that despite the tight timelines available to us.
“We worked through a number of options together with Members and we’re all strongly in favor of this approach which allows for both global and regional competitions on the pathway to the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021.”
All Members who meet the ICC Event Participation Criteria (EPPC) will be eligible to participate in the qualification for the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021.
(with inputs from ICC)
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