India men, women's teams to play T20I double-header in South Africa: BCCI

New Delhi: The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) have agreed to Cricket South Africa's proposal to play three double-header T20Is that will feature both the men and women's team early next year. 

Virat Kohli's men are set to tour South Africa in January 2018, and sources in BCCI told The Indian Express that the women also would head for a bilateral series.

"They had requested us and we have accepted their proposal. It will help women's team a lot and the matches will be shown live too. It will be played on the same stadium before India games. The BCCI is planning to have similar kind of activity for women’s in future too. There will be more India A games for women's team in future," sources said.

However, is not the first time that such initiative has taken place. In 2015, the BCCI had kept three double headers against Australia. 

The women's T20 games are expected to be telecasted live on TV. 

In a meeting held few weeks ago, two captains Jhulan Goswami and Mithali Raj decided to draw road map for women’s cricket in the country.

Apart from more domestic games, the women’s team had wanted more overseas fixtures and bilateral series with foreign team at home.

One of the suggestions was to have India A women’s team, which BCCI seems to have agreed upon. However, their demand of women’s IPL, at the moment, doesn’t look likely to materialise in the near future.

Double headers have been catching on in the recent times a lot. "To have men and women playing on the same pitch, shown on the same TV channel, with the same commentary team, is part of this normalising process that we’re all trying to speed up as quickly as we can," Clare Connor, ECB’s director of women’s cricket, had said early this year, and it’s a sentiment that seems to be spreading across the world.