New Dates for Ranji Trophy 2022 announced, domestic tournament to begin on February 16

New Dates for Ranji Trophy 2022 announced: The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has announced the revised dates for the Ranji Trophy 2022. The domestic tournament is now slated to be played between February 16 to March 5.

The Indian cricket board, earlier, had to postpone the tournament in wake of an abrupt spike in the COVID-19 cases in India. Ranji Trophy was initially scheduled to begin on January 13.

As per the report of SportStar, the tournament will be held in eight groups of four teams each, while the six-team plat group will compete simultaneously.

Due to the COVID-19, there has been a change in the venues as well. Now, the league stage matches will be held across 9 different venues namely - Chennai, Rajkot, Thiruvananthapuram, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Cuttack, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, and Hyderabad.

The BCCI president Sourav Ganguly informed that the cricket board was earlier planning to go with the usual format of the Ranji Trophy, however, due to time constraints, a new format has been adopted.

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In the usual Ranji Trophy format, there were six different groups. Each group has six teams and five matches. As per the newly adopted format, the domestic tournament will be held in two phases. The initial phase, which is the league stage, will be held before the IPL 2022 while the final stage, which is also the playoffs, will be held after the completion of the IPL 2022.

As per the latest adopted format, Ranji Trophy league stage matches will be wrapped up by the first week of March. 

With the IPL 2022 lined up in the month of March, the cricket board wants the domestic tournament to finish off quickly and release the players so that they can timely join their respective franchises.

The BCCI secretary Jay Shah earlier informed that the IPL 2022 will begin in the last week of March and the cash-rich Indian tournament will run until the end of May. With ten teams competing, the number of matches will be increased and the window is expected to get bigger than previous editions.

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