Twenty 20 Blog

Before the final Ashes Test, Australian captain Ricky Ponting jokingly asked whether an open-top train would carry his team to Scotland if they won.

Instead Australia’s defeated cricketers face a solemn journey north tonight (EST) to begin the next phase of their UK tour.

The team will leave London and their 2-1 Ashes series defeat to England behind as they make the four-and-a-half-hour train trip to Edinburgh, where they play Scotland in a one-day tour match on Friday.

Coach Tim Nielsen said it wouldn’t take long for those players staying on for the limited-overs section of the tour to get over their defeat.

“That’s the world of an international cricketer now, you don’t have time to celebrate or commiserate too much,” Nielsen said.

“It’s put that one to bed and while this has been a huge series and it would have been fantastic to win it, it will probably take about a week to get out of the system, but what will help in that process is we’ll have one-day cricket and Twenty20 cricket to get on with.

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Former Australian batsman Michael Bevan reportedly jumped into the fray to be the new coach ahead of Kolkata Knight Riders’s (KKR) meeting this weekend in Mumbai to select John Buchanan’s successor.

An effective player in the shorter version of the game, Bevan had also coached Chennai Superstars in the Indian Cricket League. However, he’ll face competition from the likes of John Wright, Richard Pybus, Duncan Fletcher and Dermot Reeve as well as Indian candidates such as Lalchand Rajput, Ashok Malhotra and Chandrakant Pandit.

Sources say Richard Pybus, who coaches South African domestic team Titans, is a firm favourite among the lot. “The team would like to appoint someone who has the experience of coaching in Twenty20 cricket,” the source said.

“The management will go into the selection process with an open mind. At the moment I can’t say anything more,” KKR CEO Joy Bhattacharya told The Indian Express. About naming the captain for the next season, he said: “We are in no hurry to appoint the skipper. The coach’s selection is expected to be completed by August end, after that we will think about the captain.”

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Defending champions the Deccan Chargers will kick off an expanded third edition of the Indian Premier League next March in Hyderabad against the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Four new venues and a third place playoff match will be introduced in the third Indian Premier League which will get underway in Hyderabad on March 12, 2010 with a game between IPL II winners Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders.

The final of the 45-day Twenty20 cricket league, which proved a huge success in its first two editions in India and South Africa, would be held on April 25, IPL Chairman Lalit Modi announced after a meeting of its Governing Council in Mumbai on Tuesday.

IPL III will have four additional match staging centres — Nagpur, Vishakhapatnam, Ahmedabad and Dharamsala – and will also stage one extra match, the 60th, for the third place play-off, Modi said.

“The playing window remains the same, 45 days”, Modi said before adding that the Governing Council also decided to include two more franchisees in IPL IV to be held in 2011.

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South African opener Herschelle Gibbs will play for the Deccan Chargers in the Indian Champions League Twenty20 series rather than his home team Cape Cobras, which is also participating in the tournament.

Gibbs’ agent Donne Commins told the Afrikaans daily Beeld in Jo’burg that the player would be available for the IPL side and Cape Cobras will be compensated because Gibbs would not be available to play for them.

Gibbs helped Deccan Chargers win the second edition of the Indian Premier League which was shifted to South Africa because of security concerns during the elections in India. he Cape Cobras, who beat the Diamond Eagles in the final of the Pro20 series in South Africa this year, will play against the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the opening game of the Champions League.

Although their IPL teams have not qualified for the Champions League, two other South Africans who excelled in the IPL series here, Rajasthan Royal’s Graeme Smith and Mumbai Indian’s JP Duminy, may well also be playing for the Cape Cobras in India.

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Andrew Flintoff’s upcoming retirement has provoked cynical rumblings across the land as to the motives of England’s talisman. In an age where money talks most, many feel that Flintoff’s focus has been drawn from his country to the millions he can earn if fully fit and available for next year’s IPL. This may well be the case and if so who can blame him after an injury-ravaged 4 years which has seen him spend more time on the operating table than on a cricket field. Aussie stars Hayden and Gilchrist have already quit the international arena for domestic Twenty20 and the promise of a few more big paydays on the sub-continent.

However while these players were coming to the end of glittering international careers anyway (in Flintoff’s case it was becoming a question of which tendon would fail next) there’s a worrying line of thought that players might start to quit at an earlier age to cash on lucrative domestic tournaments and foreign leagues.

Twenty20 $s vs Test cricket prestige

It becomes a case of financial reward against the prestige of Test cricket. Which players are prepared to sacrifice the

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