A brand new nationwide cricket match for state faculties will launch in 2026 with the trophy awarded to the profitable groups carrying the identify of England cricketers Ben Stokes and Heather Knight.

The Knight-Stokes Cup will probably be a T20 competitors contested subsequent summer season 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 Take a look at 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 connected to the trophy.

Stokes and Knight had been educated at state faculties 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 kids with whom the ex-England captain is a trustee.

The Marylebone Cricket Membership Basis will oversee the organisation of the Knight-Stokes Cup together with regional cricket boards.

Numerous impartial faculties have agreed to offer grounds and services for state faculties to play matches.

In 2023, the Impartial Fee for Fairness in Cricket (ICEC) reported “elitism and class-based discrimination” within the recreation was partly right down to a scarcity of cricket in state faculties and a expertise pathway structurally aligned to personal faculties.

The report famous some 58% of males to play for England in 2021 had been privately educated, considerably increased than the 7% of the final inhabitants who went to personal faculty.

Suggestion 18 of the report, involving the removing of the historic fixture between public faculties Eton and Harrow fixture from Lord’s, has gained wider traction.

Senior figures on the MCC mentioned the fixture, which has been performed on the floor since 1805, ought to be relocated.

Nonetheless, it would stay on the Residence of Cricket till not less than 2027 after complaints by members of the MCC compelled the membership to achieve a compromise.