Twenty 20 Blog

The fixtures have been announced for the Champions League Twenty20, which will be staged in India in October.

Teams from India, Australia, South Africa, West Indies, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and England will play 23 games in New Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Both finalists from England’s domestic Twenty20 Cup, which concludes in August, are due to take part.

The first Champions League was due to take place last year, but was postponed following terror attacks in Mumbai.

The opening game of the tournament pits Royal Challengers Bangalore - with whom England batsman Kevin Pietersen spent time during this year’s Indian Premier League - against South African provincial side Cobras on Thursday, 8 October in Bangalore.

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Andrew Flintoff is in talks to play Twenty20 cricket in Australia’s KFC Big Bash series next winter.

The all-rounder, who announced he is quitting Test matches after the Ashes series to save his body from further wear and tear, is set to be a gun for hire.

He has lined up a move to play for the Queensland Bulls this winter and talks are understood to be at an advanced stage.

Flintoff will play in the oneday series for England against South Africa, then go to Australia before joining Chennai Super Kings for their Indian Premier League campaign.

Freddie has connections with Queensland through friend and Super Kings team-mate Matthew Hayden as well as former Lancashire colleague Stuart Law. And while England slug it out with South Africa in a four-Test series that runs deep into January, Flintoff could be picking up another big cheque for a few weeks work in the Brisbane sun.

The Australian domestic Twenty20 competition, known as the KFC Big Bash, is attracting the world’s biggest names and Flintoff’s presence will add more star quality.

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Only a week after promising at least £150,000 to each county out of the revenue pot from the new competition - which was codenamed P20 - the ECB have been forced to scrap the whole project.

The key factor, according to ECB officials, is the lack of space in an overcrowded English season. Once you have scheduled two Test series in each summer, as well as the Champions League in late September, it is impossible to fit in a new competition without jeopardising the primacy of Test cricket and the interests of the England team.

But critics suggest that the whole project has always been built on insubstantial foundations. Even after a new set of TV rights have been sold into the Asian market, it is hard to see how English cricket can afford to pay for the involvement of dozens of international stars, especially as the England players themselves would expect extra remuneration for their participation.

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The United States wants to create an elite Twenty20 cricket tournament along the lines of the lucrative Indian Premier League.

The USA Cricket Association hopes “top-class international cricket” will finally take root in the country by launching the first professional competition, the USA Premier League.

The first steps were taken Thursday by inviting proposals from potential organizers, sponsors and broadcasters in a country where American football and baseball are the main sports.

Rushmans, an international sports event management company based in England, has been appointed as commercial adviser.

The USACA said it wants them to unlock the sport’s potential in a “massive market” and use the revenues from the new league to help spread cricket across the U.S. and form a competitive international team.

“The commercial potential of cricket in the United States is widely recognized and that was underscored by the number of approaches USACA has received from many significant and prestigious organizations ranging from

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Flamboyant Pakistani all-rounder Shahid Afridi is a miffed man, who believes the team did not get enough time to celebrate their Twenty20 World Cup triumph.

Afridi, who skipped the ongoing Test series against Sri Lanka, said the feeling of winning the Twenty20 World Cup had just started to sink in when the cricketers left for the tour.

“The team should have had at least a month or so to enjoy the taste of victory. There should have been given enough time to enjoy the celebrations. It is unfortunate they got no time,” Afridi said.

According to him, the Pakistani players struggled to quickly shift to the Test mode in Sri Lanka and that explained their struggle there.

“It is upto the players to do their best to give good performances in Sri Lanka but I maintain it is unfair on them that they got little time to rest and prepare for the Sri Lankan tour,” he said.

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How about a Twenty20 Test match? Sounds odd but who knows, it could become a reality in future.

As the ICC mulls on ways to save Test cricket from the Twenty20 onslaught, a new format of a two innings Twenty20 match is slowly gaining momentum.

And many former players are not averse to the idea though some of them question whether it would suit the needs of spectators, who have lapped up the slam-bang version for its quick results.

The new format has been mooted by cricket experts and broadly envisages a Twenty20 match in two innings of 20 overs each. In other words, the match will have four innings like in Tests but would be restricted to a total of 80 overs (40 for each team in two innings).

The idea of two innings mainly stems from the fact that it would give an opportunity to top players, who fail in the opening essay to make amends in the second innings.

Moreover, the proposal has innovations like each team would be allowed to make two substitutions in the second

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John Buchanan, the former Australia coach, has said India’s ‘Fab Four” batsmen - Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman - are not suited to Twenty20 cricket. Buchanan, who worked closely with several Indian players during his stint with the Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL, made these and other observations in his new book, The Future of Cricket: The Rise of Twenty20.

Buchanan was otherwise in praise of Tendulkar - who has opted out of Twenty20 internationals but not the IPL. “Tendulkar has been lauded, and rightly so, as one of the very top batsmen in the history of cricket,” he wrote. “But is he an effective T20 player at this stage of his career?

“In the position he plays - as an opener or No. 3 - the T20 game requires not only the finesse and skills he has, but also the power and domination, an ability to take the bowlers on while being creative. You have to be inventive and fearless. And I don’t see those qualities as part of Sachin’s makeup at this stage of his career. Sachin Tendulkar is still a great player but not in this arena of T20.”

Buchanan had similar views on Tendulkar’s contemporaries, none of whom featured in the ICC World Twenty20 in England.

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Fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar has said he considered suing the Pakistan cricket management for revealing, in a public statement, the skin ailment that forced him to miss last month’s World Twenty20. The PCB’s statement on his fitness ahead of the tournament in England said Akhtar had been diagnosed with genital viral warts; he was subsequently removed from the squad.

“I kept quiet because I have a central contract and didn’t want to offend the PCB, but I could have sued the Pakistan team management,” Akhtar said in a TV programme on Express News. “I didn’t want the Pakistan team to suffer because my news is published all over the world.”

Akhtar belongs to category A of the PCB’s centrally contracted players, who are barred from openly criticising the cricket board’s decisions.

The injury-prone fast bowler last played a Test in 2007, against India, before he was sidelined for 14 months with fitness and disciplinary problems. He made two unimpressive comebacks to international cricket this year - in the one-day series at home against Sri Lanka, and the five ODIs and lone Twenty20 against Australia in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Akhtar, however, believes he can still get back to his best.

“There’s still three-four good years left in me,” he said. “I am the fastest bowler in history and it’s not possible for everyone to bowl at 150 (kph).”

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand–Some top players are delaying signing new contracts with New Zealand Cricket over concerns the team’s international program next season will conflict with their lucrative roles in the Indian Premier League, local media reported Thursday.

The New Zealand Herald newspaper named wicketkeeper Brendon McCullum and all-rounder Jacob Oram _ New Zealand’s highest-paid players in the IPL _ among players who were hesitant to sign contracts until dates for the next IPL tournament had been released.

The newspaper said players were concerned New Zealand’s home series against Australia in March and April next year may clash with the Indian Twenty20 league. McCullum currently earns up to $700,000 and Oram $675,000 to play in the IPL, although the amount players receive is based on the number of games they play.

New Zealand Cricket chief executive Justin Vaughan told the Herald players had until July 24 to sign contracts and he was confident all 20 players offered contracts last month would sign. Vaughan said concerns over a clash between the Australian tour and the IPL were speculative because no dates for the Indian tournament had yet been set.

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The ICC has said that the IPL will not be given a permanent slot in the international cricketing calendar. Many top cricketers missed out during the two editions of the league due to national commitments, prompting calls for granting the tournament a permanent window in the ICC calendar.

However, the game’s governing body is not considering such a proposal at the moment. “No we are not considering giving a window to IPL. Mr Lalit Modi [the IPL commissioner] has frequently said that a window for IPL is not appropriate and I agree with him,” ICC president David Morgan told PTI.

Asked whether this could lead to players opting out of bilateral tours to take part in the IPL, Morgan said it would only happen in the case of those on the brink of retirement. “I think some cricketers who are coming to the end of their career will opt to play in domestic leagues like IPL,” Morgan said. “But I believe established international cricketers will want to play international cricket.

Haroon Lorgat, the ICC’s chief executive, had earlier said that an IPL window would be considered for the new Future

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