Women's World Cup schedule remains unchanged despite tightening of Covid-19 restrictions in New Zealand

Plans are in place to use the original six venues for the tournament after the number of grounds identified to stage international matches was streamlined

Venues for the Women's World Cup remain unchanged despite New Zealand being under new Covid-19 restrictions as a result of the spread of the Omicron variant.

Tournament organisers are determined that the six grounds reserved for matches will continue to be used.

Christchurch's Hagley Oval, Eden Park in Auckland, Bay Oval at Mount Maunganui, Seddon Park in Hamilton, Wellington's Basin Reserve and University Oval in Dunedin are set to stage the 31 matches.

New Zealand's remaining international schedule has been streamlined amid rising cases of the virus.

But no such plan is afoot for the World Cup, already delayed once by 12 months due to Covid, scheduled to get underway on March 4.

"We did look at multiple contingency plans over the last 12 months as you can well imagine," said tournament chief executive Andrea Nelson. "But the plan is to retain the schedule as it is with the six venues."

"The message is: we set out to kind of create a fantastic platform for these athletes to perform on, and we remain fully committed to doing that."

"The contingency measures we're putting in place relate to kind of partaking the travel between those venues as much as possible. 

"One of the factors in New Zealand is that our venues are very different to, for example, some of the venues in the subcontinent or the UK. 

"For those that have watched cricket in New Zealand, we've got grass-bank stadiums, smaller stadiums that don't have hotels built into them. So it's a very different environment to how some of it have been staged recently."

While New Zealand moving to red on its traffic light system does not constitute a full lockdown, it does include a cap of 100 vaccinated people at events and mask-wearing in shops and public transport.

Though international and domestic matches are behind closed doors, World Cup chiefs remain hopeful supporters will be permitted to attend the competition, though the logistics need ironing out.

^{Hagley Oval will host five games including the final on April 3 (Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images)}

"There are no significant changes to the way we deliver it for the players," added Nelson. "Predominantly, the changes are related to the spectators inside the stadium.

"New Zealand has moved to a traffic-light system. And broadly speaking, that puts at the moment attendance [which] can be only in groups of 100. So the work we're undertaking at the moment is how many groups of 100 can we fit within each stadium. 

"And we're working through a bit of detail on all that. But really, the message is: we set out to kind of create a fantastic platform for these athletes to perform on, and we remain fully committed to doing that."

Each of the eight competing teams are forced to undergo 10 days of isolation upon their arrival in New Zealand in the government's Managed Isolation and Quarantine facilities.

India, who face New Zealand in six white-ball matches in Queenstown, have already arrived in the county to begin their stint, while Australia and England brought forward the start of the Women's Ashes by a week to give themselves extra time to prepare for the tournament.