ICC World Twenty20 Cricket

ICC World Twenty20 Cricket

About Twenty20 

Twenty20 is the newest form of cricket in which each team bats for a maximum of only 20 overs a side, with each innings lasting for 80 minutes.

Twenty20 cricket was first introduced at county level by the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2003 and such was the success of this format of the sport, the game quickly spread around the world with the first full men’s Twenty20 international taking place in February 2005 between New Zealand and Australia.

The ICC Board agreed to the inclusion of an ICC World Twenty20 competition at a meeting in April 2006.

It was agreed that the inaugural event would take place in South Africa in September 2007, with the second event scheduled for England and Wales during the ICC’s Centenary Year in 2009.

The remaining period up to 2015 will be taken up either by one or two further ICC World Twenty20 competition, depending on the success of those first two events.

How teams qualified

The ten full Members of the ICC are taking part in the event after accepting invitations to do so, but Kenya and Scotland, who are Associate members of the ICC, had a much tougher route to South Africa.

The two Associate countries qualified on the back of reaching the final of the ICC World Cricket League Division 1 - a six-team competition between Bermuda, Canada, Ireland, Kenya, the Netherlands and Scotland - in Nairobi in January and February 2007.

The round-robin event, which also served as a vital final preparation for the ICC Cricket World Cup, saw the top two teams qualify for a final, where Kenya defeated Scotland by eight wickets, and that has earned both teams, in common with the ten ICC Full Members, a $ US 250,000 as a participation fee for the tournament.

The Division 1 event in Kenya is the summit of five global divisions in the ICC World Cricket League, which sits on top of a regional tournament structure that opens the qualifying pathway to the ICC Cricket World Cup to almost all ICC Members.

The ICC World Cricket League Division 3 took place in Darwin, Australia in May 2007, with Division 2 scheduled for Windhoek, Namibia in November 2007, building up to an ICC Cricket World Cup qualifying event in 2009.

Tournament format

Twenty20 is the newest form of cricket where each team bats for no more than 20 overs a side, with each innings lasting for a maximum of 80 minutes.

The ICC World Twenty20 2007 in South Africa is the first global event of this nature and will feature 12 teams fighting it out over two weeks in an intensive programme of fast-paced, action-packed cricket.

In the initial stage, there will be four groups of three teams with each side playing two matches. The top two teams in each group go through to two further groups where they each play three further matches.

Team names for the Super Eight stage are indicative based on the top two teams from the Group Stage qualifying. If these teams do qualify they will be seeded in position 1 and 2 as specified regardless of whether they finish first or second in their group.

For example, if West Indies (A2) win Group A and South Africa come second, for the purposes of the Super Eights, South Africa will still be A1 and West Indies will be A2. If, for example, Bangladesh qualifies instead of South Africa, Bangladesh will become A1.

The top two from these groups will then proceed to the knock-out phase with the semi-finals taking place on the same day (22 September) in Cape Town and Durban. The final will be on Monday, 24 September in Johannesburg.

The winning team at the ICC World Twenty20 will collect $490,000 in prize money. The team that wins all its matches will get $955,000 and the team that wins all its matches but loses the final gets $465,000.

Every match in the tournament has prize money at stake but sides do not get any money for losing matches. The total prize money for the event is $1.9 million.