The International Cricket Council has named the Vadodara International Cricket Stadium at Kotambi as one of two venues for the first ICC Women’s Champions Trophy, to be played from 14 to 28 February 2027. Mumbai’s Cricket Club of India ground at Brabourne takes the other half. The ICC confirmed the venues days after its board handed India the hosting rights on 1 September, taking the event away from Sri Lanka.
The format
Six teams play a T20 round-robin: Australia, England, India, New Zealand, South Africa and Sri Lanka. Every side meets every other side once, and the top two go to the final on 28 February. Fifteen league fixtures plus a final, split across two grounds roughly 400 km apart. The ICC has not yet said which matches land where, and it has not named the final’s venue.
How Kotambi got here in two years
The stadium sits about 30 km outside Vadodara, off the Harod-Halol-Vadodara road, with seating for 35,000. It staged its first international in December 2024, an India-West Indies women’s ODI series. A men’s ODI between India and New Zealand followed in January 2026.
The Women’s Premier League did more for the venue’s case than either. Kotambi hosted six WPL matches in 2025 and eleven in 2026, which gave the ground a run of women’s fixtures at close intervals, the kind of load a Champions Trophy leg imposes. Baroda Cricket Association chief executive Snehal Parikh called the selection well deserved and pointed to the feedback the ground has drawn from players and officials, IANS reported.
Two more assignments arrive before the Champions Trophy. India play Zimbabwe in a three-match women’s ODI series at Kotambi on 23, 25 and 28 October, and the India women’s under-19 side meet England’s on 26 and 28 November. Both function as rehearsals for the February event.
What this means for Vadodara
Gujarat’s cricket map has been dominated by Ahmedabad since the Narendra Modi Stadium reopened at Motera in 2020, and the state’s other grounds have mostly picked up what Ahmedabad’s calendar left over. Kotambi is the first venue in the state to be handed a share of an ICC event on its own account, and it has done so on the women’s game rather than by waiting for men’s fixtures to trickle down.
The economics are modest but real. A two-week tournament brings six touring squads, broadcast crews and travelling supporters into a city that draws far less sports tourism than Ahmedabad, in a February window that suits both the weather and the hotel trade. The bigger question is the road. Thirty kilometres of approach from the city, on a route not built for match-day volumes, is the practical limit on how many spectators the 35,000 seats can actually deliver.
What to watch
Three things over the next few months. Whether Vadodara draws India’s group matches, which decides how full the ground gets. Whether the final goes to Kotambi or Brabourne. And whether the state and the civic body commit anything to the approach road and parking before February, because the October and November fixtures will show the gap well before the ICC’s cameras do.
Sources: ICC, IANS, The Free Press Journal
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.