A brand new nationwide cricket match for state colleges will launch in 2026 with the trophy awarded to the successful groups carrying the title of England cricketers Ben Stokes and Heather Knight.
The Knight-Stokes Cup will probably be a T20 competitors contested subsequent summer time through a sequence of knockout regional qualifiers with the finals to be staged on the primary floor at Lord’s.
The match will probably be for varsity pupils within the yr 10 age group with separate occasions for girls and boys.
BBC Sport understands England males’s Check captain Stokes and England girls’s batter Knight, who stepped down as skipper earlier this yr, have given their blessing for his or her names to be hooked up to the trophy.
Stokes and Knight had been educated at state colleges in Cockermouth and Plymouth respectively.
The match has been conceived by Michael Vaughan and is being part-funded by the Black Coronary heart Basis, a charity which seeks to assist under-privileged youngsters with whom the ex-England captain is a trustee.
The Marylebone Cricket Membership Basis will oversee the organisation of the Knight-Stokes Cup along side regional cricket boards.
Quite a few unbiased colleges have agreed to supply grounds and services for state colleges to play matches.
In 2023, the Unbiased Fee for Fairness in Cricket (ICEC) reported “elitism and class-based discrimination” within the recreation was partly all the way down to an absence of cricket in state colleges and a expertise pathway structurally aligned to non-public colleges.
The report famous some 58% of males to play for England in 2021 had been privately educated, considerably increased than the 7% of the overall inhabitants who went to non-public college.
Suggestion 18 of the report, involving the elimination of the historic fixture between public colleges Eton and Harrow fixture from Lord’s, has gained wider traction.
Senior figures on the MCC stated the fixture, which has been performed on the floor since 1805, needs to be relocated.
Nonetheless, it’s going to stay on the House of Cricket till at the very least 2027 after complaints by members of the MCC compelled the membership to succeed in a compromise.
