Vijay Hazare tournament to begin on February 20

New Delhi. According to the Cricket Board of India (BCCI), the Vijay Hazare Trophy ODI cricket tournament will start from February 20 and the matches will run till March 14. It will be played in five cities as well as in Tamil Nadu in a bio-safe environment. For this tournament, players will have to come to the Bio Bubble on February 13, after which they will have to undergo a three-time Kovid-19 investigation. BCCI Secretary Jai Shah announced the program which mentioned five of the six locations. These five cities are Surat, Indore, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Jaipur while eight teams of Plate Group will play their matches at different grounds in Tamil Nadu.
According to the BCCI protocol players must undergo three RT-PCR tests before joining their bio-bubble. They will have to do so even before the knock-out stages (pre-quarter-finals) starting on March 7. According to the BCCI notification, Elite Group A will include Gujarat, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Tripura, Baroda, Goa. Their matches will be played in Surat. Group B consists of Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Vidarbha, Andhra Pradesh. Its matches will be played in Indore. Group C matches will be held in Bengaluru, with six teams from hosts Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Odisha, Railways and Bihar. Group D will have teams from Delhi, Mumbai, Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Puducherry and its matches are scheduled in Jaipur. Group E matches will be played in Kolkata with hosts Bengal, with teams from Army, Jammu and Kashmir, Saurashtra, Haryana and Chandigarh. Plate group matches will be held at different grounds in Tamil Nadu. It has teams from Uttarakhand, Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Sikkim.