WPL auction to take place in the 2nd week of February 2023

The first Women’s Premier League (WPL) player auction is scheduled for February 11 in New Delhi or February 13 in Mumbai. The BCCI will make a final decision this week. Originally, the BCCI planned to host the players’ auction on February 6 in Mumbai, giving the five newly formed franchises little under a month to prepare for the inaugural WPL season, which is set to take place between March 4 and 24. However, the BCCI was obliged to alter that plan due to two factors.

One, the bulk of the five WPL franchise owners also own clubs in the ILT20 in the UAE and the SA20 in South Africa, both of which have finals planned on February 12 and 11, respectively. It could generate issues for the franchises because their owners and support staff would want to stay with the clubs for the knockouts as well as attend the WPL player auction, which will all be conducted in different countries. The owners of three IPL clubs, MI, RCB, and DC, as well as Adani Group and Capri Global, won the five WPL franchises for a total of INR 4669.99 crore (about USD 572.78 million) in what is the largest deal in women’s cricket.

Read more: SA20: Squads and broadcasting details for the inaugural season

Jhulan to be part of MI

MI Emirates, Dubai Capitals, Gulf Giants (Adani), and Sharjah Warriors are four of the five WPL franchises with teams in the ILT20 (Capri). The owners of Mumbai and Capitals also have teams in the SA20: MI Capitals of Cape Town and Pretoria. The second issue is that the teams have had little time to put together their coaching staff, which will be important when it comes to selecting players at the auction. As a result, it is believed that the franchises collectively requested that the auction be postponed from February 6 to a later date.

In other developments, Mumbai has hired former India fast bowler Jhulan Goswami as a bowling coach and mentor. While Mumbai has not made the announcement public, former India captain Sourav Ganguly, who has returned to Capitals as team director after serving as BCCI president from 2019 to October 2022, has. Goswami, 40, announced his retirement from international cricket last year. According to Ganguly, the Capitals were also interested in bringing in Goswami, who has 355 international wickets across formats, the most of any bowler in women’s cricket. “Jhulan has gone to Mumbai,” Ganguly informed the journalists on Tuesday at Eden Gardens. “We made her an offer, but she chose to go to Mumbai.”