Twenty 20 Blog

Virender Sehwag has stepped down as captain of Delhi Daredevils, the franchise said on Monday. Sehwag, who is recovering from a shoulder injury, said he wanted to focus on his batting. Gautam Gambhir will lead Delhi in next month’s Champions League Twenty20, and is expected to remain captain in next year’s IPL, with wicketkeeper Dinesh Karthik as his deputy.

“I would like to thank GMR [the franchise owners] for their understanding in accepting my request to step down,” Sehwag said. “Personally, I would like to concentrate on my own batting and contribute to the team.”

Sehwag - who recently had said he had no desire to lead India - informed the franchise of his decision immediately after the IPL’s second edition in May this year. But given the team’s great success in the tournament - they topped the league table and lost to eventual champions Deccan Chargers in the semi-final - the owners believed the decision was impulsive and decided to give him more time.

“We thought he [Sehwag] had made a statement in the heat of the moment,” a team official told Cricinfo. “We consulted him once again, about a month later. He stuck to his stand. So after deliberations we started to look for a successor and zeroed in on Gambhir.”

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Thrilling contests will be the order of the day at the Champions Trophy, especially following a raging debate over the future of one-day cricket.

The 11-year-old tournament may have witnessed many nail-biting matches, but is still competing with the 50-over World Cup and Twenty20 World Championships for popularity and glamour.

Wisden described the 2006 edition — held just five months before the World Cup — as “the unwanted stepchild of international cricket”, while Matthew Hayden recently suggested the tournament be scrapped.

“Playing the World Twenty20 every other year is too much. And why have the Champions Trophy when you’ve already got a 50-over World Cup?” former Australian batsman Hayden wrote in a newspaper column.

The biennial tournament, a brainchild of former International Cricket Council (ICC) chief Jagmohan Dalmiya, has already had more than its fair share of criticism since it was launched in 1998 in Dhaka.

The event was known as ICC Knock-Out at Dhaka and at Nairobi two years later, but its format left a lot to be desired as just one bad match sent the favourites home, like Australia.

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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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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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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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Has Shane Warne still got it and does he fancy a game in Cardiff this week? Those were the questions being asked by Australians at Lord’s last night as Warne’s Rajasthan Royals played a Twenty20 charity match against Middlesex Panthers.

It was, the legendary leg spinner claimed, his final match at Lord’s and he took a wicket to mark the occasion, but one suspects that there may be one or two more final appearances if the right money is offered.

He did not need any of the old magic as Middlesex continued their abject season in Twenty20 cricket. Chasing 163 to beat Rajasthan, they needed 11 an over when Warne brought himself on for the ninth over. He marked out a short run-up, adjusted his field several times and tossed out a ball that was so wide of Dawid Malan’s off stump that it would have needed two “balls of the century” for it to turn enough to hit the wicket.

Warne would later dismiss Malan, stumped as he tried desperately to accelerate the score, and despite several wayward balls he kept the rate down with ten runs off his first three overs to set up a 46-run victory.

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With a glittering array of batting talent, the experience of winning in 2007 and huge partisan crowds India were the bookies favourites to win the ICC World Twenty20 2009. Their failure to even make it out of the Super 8s was the biggest shock of the tournament.

So why did India fail to perform?  With all due respect to the likes of Zaheer Khan and RP Singh, it’s the batsmen who win matches in Twenty20 and India’s star-studded line-up were like rabbits in the headlights at times, a fact captain Mahendra Dhoni has acknowledged.

“The bowlers did well but the batting really hasn’t been up to the mark. With the batsmen, if the top three don’t click it becomes very hard.”

The loss of Sehwag hit India hard

A lot of people underestimated just how much the loss of injured opener Virender Sehwag would affect the team. Sehwag is a proven performer on the biggest stage and India missed his ability to set the tone of an innings and make the best attacks look ordinary. Momentum is huge in Twenty20 and without Sehwag, India lacked experience at the

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