New format in focus at USACA T20 National Championship

More than 100 of USA's top players are heading to Florida this weekend to take part in the 2015 USACA T20 National Championship. They will compete for spots in an 18-man USA squad for the ICC Americas Division One Twenty20, which will be announced at the conclusion of the event on Sunday. USA will be hosting the Americas Division One T20 - a four-team event that also features Bermuda, Canada and Suriname - in May.

The tournament will also see the introduction of a different format. Eight teams have been split into two groups of four with the top two in each group advancing to Sunday's semi-finals in Lauderhill. According to the USACA tournament press release, teams will not play anyone in their group. Instead, each team will play the four teams in the opposite group.

While this allows for each regional team to play an additional match in the group stage to press their case for national selection, it may also result in a severely unbalanced knockout stage. Theoretically, four teams could finish 4-0 in Group A and four teams at 0-4 in Group B resulting in two undefeated teams going to the semi-finals, along with two winless teams that would move forward based on the net run rate tiebreaker in their respective groups.