THE Oval will be the venue for the final of next year’s Champions Trophy, the ICC competition being staged in England for the first time in September. The Rose Bowl in Southampton, which staged its first international last season, and Edgbaston have won the right to the other matches. Lord’s and Trent Bridge, whose owners had also expressed an interest, will be compensated by the award of one-day internationals earlier in the season.

The three grounds chosen will each stage five matches in a televised tournament between the ten Test nations, plus Kenya and the winner of the ICC trophy to be held in the United Arab Emirates in March. The competition will run from September 10 to 25, with rain days scheduled for all matches. Teams will be seeded on the basis of their official one-day international ranking on December 1 this year, so the exact schedule will not be known until then.

The format divides teams into four groups of three, the winners of each group progressing to knockout semifinals. There is a total prize fund of $1.25 million (about £750,000).

It perhaps gives a fair indication of the status of the tournament that whereas most cricket followers could name the winners of the World Cups since 1975, not many could answer who won the last Champions Trophy only a little more than a year ago in Sri Lanka. The answer is that the host nation shared the trophy with India, the other finalist, after two rainedoff matches in Colombo.

“Overall, the allocation of international matches next season is fair and should satisfy everyone,” John Carr, the ECB’s director of cricket operations, said. “The venues for the Champions Trophy were chosen in collaboration with the ICC.”

Considerations included an ICC stipulation that two of the venues should be within an hour’s drive of one another, a criterion just about met by Birmingham and Southampton, or possibly Kennington and Southampton, in a fast car on a good motorway day. The fact that MCC likes to run its own show at Lord’s without being obliged to comply with various ICC requirements also worked against the choice of the ground that has held all four of the World Cup finals held in England.

The Oval holds less than 20,000, as opposed to the near-30,000 capacity at Lord’s, but the Oval’s pitches tend to play better in late season than those in north-west London, where September finals were notoriously prone to early finishes. Roger Knight, MCC secretary, said that to have held more than one match in the tournament would have caused problems with the square and planned improvements in the pavilion that are expected to start next September.