Tag: CLT20

The T20 Champions League

It’s come up a couple of times on Twitter, so to clarify: I am not watching the T20 Champions League. This is not because it is T20 per se, though that doesn’t help. Rather there are a few reasons why I am not only utterly uninterested in the tournament, I actively dislike it.

The biggest set of problems is that the concept does not really work in cricket the way it does in football. In football, club competition is the most commonly played and there are hundreds of well established clubs all in relatively close geographic proximity to each other. They all play the same season with the same regulations and under the same central governing body. It works out well and almost follows naturally that they would play some games between each other. But none of this is the case in cricket. The various T20 leagues all play at different times of the year and for much shorter periods than football. (Though the shorter season is, at least, an improvement.) There is also a much greater emphasis on international cricket than there is on international football, with tours taking up most of the calendar instead of scattered international weekends. And unlike in Europe, all of the T20 cricket leagues are geographically distant from each other. The idea of a cricket Champions League is simply not feasible the way it is with football and it is a mistake to try to force one.

Those are all theoretical problems that cannot be overcome and why the notion of a cricket Champions League will never really work the way the football version does. But at least if the problems ended there it could still at least be a mildly interesting curiosity. But the forced implementation has thrown up a whole host of new objections.

The biggest is that the tournament is a de facto extension of the IPL and with the same overall goal: to make money for the BCCI. It has all the same hype and superficiality of the IPL and designed to appeal to the same audience of the IPL. And therefore like the IPL, the whole spectacle is revolting. The tournament is also massively biased in favour of the Indian teams. Presumably that’s to dispel any lingering doubts about who the beneficiary of the whole affair is. The Indian teams go directly into the tournament proper, are given first pick of the players and are allowed more international players than the other teams.

The most annoying aspect of the T20 Champions League is that there is a completely undeserved international window for it. It is a competition comprising only domestic clubs; there is nothing international about it. And even if there were, that should not mean that it gets a window. Should England demand a window for all future Test series? The effect is that I have to wait until the end of the month for international cricket (and until November for Test cricket) because the ICC are in India’s pocket. I am not happy about this.

Morgan’s folly

It was revealed on Cricinfo today that the ECB are going to accept the Morgan review and reduce the County Championship to 14 matches from 2014. I’ve written before about what a dreadful idea it is and that hasn’t changed. The fixture congestion is not going to be effectively eased and the four day game is still popular in England. All this is doing is reducing the amount of proper cricket for no discernible gain. What is particularly galling though is that the reason for the added fixture congestion is that the end of the season is being brought forward to accommodate the Champions League T20 competition.

The fact that we are decimating (more than, actually) our own premier competition for the benefit of a farcical, meaningless T20 competition in which we are not even stakeholders is absolutely infuriating. The ECB have already kowtowed to the BCCI about the DRS and already allow players to play in the IPL instead of for their counties. Now they are going to let our fixture list be dictated by Indian administrators who not only do not care about it’s health, but who have shown an active antipathy toward it! In many ways the ECB are the best run of all the cricket boards, but in addition to not scheduling enough Test matches every time they have looked like properly standing up to India they have folded. It is an absolute disgrace.

I’m not going to be so melodramatic as to say this will ruin the County Championship, but I do think it will hurt it. Sixteen matches is just about enough to avoid flukey results, but even then a lot is dependent on the rain staying away early in the season. What will we do when there is a wet spring and the first nine of 14 matches are badly rain affected? England is the only country in the world where domestic first class matches have their own following. Why damage that at all? Why not try to improve attendance and following of these matches instead of abandoning them for more T20s, both domestic and foreign? I have never seen anything that actually confirms the notion that people who come to the game via T20 actually go on to watch first class cricket. If Indian ‘supporters’ are anything by which to go it seems that T20 viewers are mostly loud, uninformed and at best apathetic toward Test cricket. Their money counts the same as the money of those who care about the first class game, but if the ECB truly care about the long term future of the game they must cater to those who also care, not those who don’t.