India will face South Africa in ICC World Cup 2019 opener

The ICC Cricket World Cup is scheduled to be held in England in 2019 and India will be starting off their campaign against the Proteas on the 4th of June.

This would be the first time that India won’t be playing arch-rivals Pakistan in their opening game.

The complete schedule of fixtures will be released on April 30th.

The 2019 World Cup format is a round-robin one, with all ten teams set to take on each other during the tournament.

The tournament opener will be played at the Oval and the final will be played at the iconic Lord’s stadium.

“The 2019 IPL will be played between March 29 and May 19. But we need to maintain a 15-day gap and World Cup starts on May 30. Therefore as per 15 day gap we could have only played on June 4. Earlier, we were scheduled to start on June 2 but we couldn’t have played on that day,” a BCCI official said.

“This is the first time Indo-Pak match won’t be a starting affair. Since the format will be a round robin affair (all teams playing each other like 1992),” he added.

The BCCI official also shed some light on India’s 2019-2023 FTP cycle and the Test championship, confirming that India will not be playing any day-night matches as the World Test Championship had only day matches(played with red ball).

“As we had decided, India will play a maximum 309 days of international cricket in this cycle across formats, a reduction of 92 days from the earlier cycle. However, the number of home Test matches will increase from 15 to 19. All these Tests will be part of the World Test Championship.

“All matches in ICC World Test Championship are day matches played with a red ball. If that’s the case, there is no point in playing pink ball Tests if it doesn’t help in preparation for World Test Championship” the official concluded.