Women's cricket gets its first indoor tournament

The Punjab Cricket Association (PCA) stadium at Mohali is famous. Acknowledged across the country as probably the finest cricket stadium, the PCA stadium has won plaudits all around. Chandigarh is now home to another new initiative that will be welcomed nationwide. Starting on Friday the Pink Hall at the Baradari Gardens plays host to the first ever women's indoor tournament.

After the recently concluded CricInfo Rani Jhansi tournament held in Chennai there has been a bit of a lull in womens cricket. With the women's World Cup in New Zealand coming up later this year, it will be to the advantage of Indian women if they play as much cricket as possible. At the end of the CricInfo Rani Jhansi tournament a list of over 30 probables was announced. At that point it was not entirely clear what kind of preparatory camps the set of probables would have.

It now seems that they will have one camp together at most. In the mean time they will have to be content playing tournaments of this kind for their respective teams. The three day tournament brings together teams from all over the country including Maharashtra, Gujrat, Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, Orrisa, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Daman and Diu, Delhi, Rajasthan and Punjab.

Indoor cricket is still in its infancy all around the world. To ease the concept in to the subcontinent as painlessly as possible, the three-day tournament will be attended by the secretary, World Indoor Cricket Association, Bob Menca.