Ghana in line to host cricket tournament at 2023 Africa Games

ICC give blessing to sport’s enlargement into multi-sport video games, with Olympics additionally on agenda

Cricket might be included on the 2023 Africa Video games because the ICC more and more seems to multi-sport occasions as a solution to develop the sport.

ESPNcricinfo understands the ICC Africa workplace have been in discussions with the native organising committee in Ghana with a view to together with cricket on the occasion. A delegation, together with officers from the ICC, the Ghana Cricket Affiliation and the Ghana Ministry of Sports activities, has visited the proposed venues to make sure the requisite services might be supplied.

The suggestions is known to have been overwhelmingly optimistic, although cricket’s inclusion has not been confirmed at this stage.

Whether or not it involves fruition or not, the transfer underlines the ICC’s apparently new-found want to embrace multi-sports video games. The inclusion of girls’s cricket has already been confirmed for the Commonwealth Games of 2022, whereas there’s growing momentum for a return to The Olympics. The brand new ECB chair, Ian Watmore, is known to be a eager advocate of such a transfer and can shortly be positioned accountable for an ICC sub-committee with a remit to discover the probabilities. Cricket’s inclusion as early as 2028, when the Olympics return to Los Angeles, stays potential.

There has lengthy been a starvation amongst ICC Affiliate members to incorporate cricket within the Olympics, particularly. It will, they argue, result in better publicity for the game of their particular person nations and open up new avenues of public funding. However there was resistance from some full member nations who’ve expressed concern that the period of time required for the Olympics would eat into the time out there for bilateral sequence and varied nationwide T20 tournaments.

More and more, nevertheless, there has been an understanding at the ICC that multi-sport video games would supply cricket with each a shop-window for potential new supporters and improve competitors and business alternatives for its members. With the ECB, who imagine it will present impetus for the expansion of the ladies’s sport particularly, now broadly behind the thought, a number of the impediments in the direction of progress have been eliminated.