Two-day matches will be played entirely after Christmas for the first time since 1926 after Cricket ACT finalised the make-up of this summer's modified fixture.
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The eight grade clubs will be split into two pools for the time-honoured two-day Douglas Cup, which will be made up of just three regular season rounds before a top-four finals series.
Last season's club championship standings will be used to make up the pools, which are yet to be finalised.
Cricket across the Territory will come out of hibernation on the first weekend of November, with the opening round of the one-day competition set to usher in the COVID-delayed new season.
Seven rounds of one-day matches will precede the Twenty20 competition, to be played during the middle of the season before the Douglas Cup follows.
All three competitions will boast semi-finals, after previous suggestions the Douglas Cup would be decided via a one-off final between the top two sides.
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"We have got four semi-finals in all comps as well and that was one of they key principles we were trying to meet," Cricket ACT operations and competitions manager Andrew Crozier said.
"Because of the pool system in the two-day comp, we managed to have a few extra Sundays that the clubs wanted to engage in therefore we were able to have semi-finals in all comps.
"That was the only way we could do it because there was obviously a real push in the majority of clubs.
"It was a long conversation around whether red-ball cricket should happen and whether we'd have enough weeks, I think NSW are having a very similar conversation, they've wrestled with the same sort of problem.
"Red ball cricket was deemed important and therefore we manufactured a competition with the weeks we had left."
Cricket ACT announced last week it would be resuming in early November.
Community sport has been cleared to return on the last weekend of October, but Cricket ACT opted to provide clubs with an extra week of preseason training to reduce the prevalence of post-lockdown soft-tissue injuries.
James Buckley
James is a Queanbeyan boy enjoying his second stint at the Canberra Times, more than eight years on from his first. In between he's traveled the world, and spent time covering sport in Sydney.
James is a Queanbeyan boy enjoying his second stint at the Canberra Times, more than eight years on from his first. In between he's traveled the world, and spent time covering sport in Sydney.
