Dubai, Jan 23 (PTI) The International Cricket Council (ICC) on Thursday confirmed that four among 16 countries will qualify for the tournament proper of ICC World T20 scheduled to be held in India in 2021.

The event replaces the eight-team Champions Trophy ODI tournament that was last held in 2017 in England.

According to an ICC media release, 11 regional qualification tournaments will take place across the five ICC regions (Africa, Americas, Asia, East-Asia Pacific and Europe) with eight teams progressing to one of two global qualifying events.

Additionally, the bottom four teams from the T20 World Cup 2020, will join the regional qualifiers in the global qualification events along with the next four best T20I ranked teams as of 1 January 2020. These four teams are Zimbabwe, Nepal, UAE and Hong Kong.

This means 16 teams will compete for four T20 World Cup spots in two global qualifiers with the top two teams from each progressing to the event proper in 2021.

The 12 teams, which make round two of the ICC T20 World Cup 2020 in Australia will gain automatic entry into the event the following year.

ICC Head of Events Chris Tetley said: "The decision to replace the Champions Trophy with a T20 World Cup in 2021 was driven by our commitment to global growth and use T20 as our vehicle to do that. Of course that presented us with a one-off qualification challenge.

"Our regional and global qualification pathways have been established and consistently provide compelling and competitive cricket and we didn''t want to lose that despite the tight timelines available to us.

"We worked through a number of options together with Members and we''re all strongly in favour of this approach which allows for both global and regional competitions on the pathway to the ICC Men''s T20 World Cup 2021."

All Members who meet the ICC Event Participation Criteria (EPPC) will be eligible to participate in the qualification for the ICC Men''s T20 World Cup 2021.

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