Twenty 20 Blog

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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David Warner is still waiting to hear what went wrong with his one-day career.

Remember whirlwind Warner last summer?

He brought the biff back to Twenty20 with an incredible 83 against South Africa. The kid was promptly introduced to the opening spot in the one-day internationals in the hope he would be some sort of meta mix of Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden.

In the six 50-over games he played Warner scored 5, 61, 1, 22, 7 and 2 before selector Jamie Cox tapped him on the shoulder.

The selector said ‘thanks pal, you’re not playing today, pack your bags you are no longer in the squad. Give us a call sometime and we’ll chat’.

And that was all she wrote.

You might, like Warner, have thought the selectors would have been on the Cricket Australia mobile telling the young man what they wanted. But no.

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Ponting, 34, will remain as captain of the Australian Test and one-day sides but will step away from the shortest format in a bid to prolong his career.

In a statement, he revealed he had made the decision “after much thought and careful consideration”.

Ponting, determined to win back the Ashes, will have “set periods of rest” during the international calendar.

He went on: “As I said after the fifth Test in London, I am hoping to continue playing Test cricket for as long as possible and retiring from the Twenty20 format gives me the best chance of doing this.
“While I will no longer be available for Australian Twenty20 cricket, I look forward to playing with Tasmania’s KFC Big Bash team where possible and to fulfilling my contract with the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League.”

Cricket Australia chief executive officer James Sutherland said: “We are very supportive of the decision Ricky has made and understanding of the reasons behind it.
“Needless to say he will be a huge loss to the Twenty20 side but it does present opportunities for the other players

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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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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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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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England have been grouped with hosts West Indies and one qualifier in the World Twenty20 tournament in 2010.

The West Indies, who knocked England out of this year’s tournament, will open the competition on 30 April.

Holders Pakistan face Australia and Bangladesh, with Sri Lanka pooled against New Zealand and Zimbabwe.

India take on South Africa and another qualifier, with the tournament, staged in St Lucia, St Kitts, Barbados and Guyana, set to finish on 16 May.

Chris Gayle’s West Indies defeated England at the Super Eight stage in this year’s Twenty20, winning a match in which the winner would qualify from their group.

In a rain-affected contest, an unbeaten partnership of 37 between Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan saw the Windies home.

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Reigning 50-over world champions Australia, have been ranked below Bangladesh for next year’s World Twenty20 in the Caribbean, organisers announced Sunday.

Seedings are based primarily on the results of last month’s second edition of the tournament in England where Pakistan, losing finalists in 2007, beat Sri Lanka at Lord’s to take the trophy.

Australia lost both their group matches, against the West Indies and Sri Lanka. Bangladesh also failed to make it through to the second round, after defeats by minnows Ireland and 2007 champions India.

But Bangladesh emerged with a slightly better, if still negative, run-rate compared to that of Australia (-0.996 to -1.331).

Both countries have now been placed in the same first round Group A, along with defending champions Pakistan.

The top two sides from each of the four groups in the 12-nation men’s tournament will go through to the second round Super Eights from which the top four sides for the semi-finals will be drawn.

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The proposed Southern Premier League involving teams based in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand looks increasingly unlikely to go ahead due to the crowded international calendar.

It had been hoped the Twenty20 tournament, which would involve the leading players from all three countries plus other international stars, would be held in October every year, starting from 2011.

But early discussions around the International Cricket Council’s post-2012 Future Tours Programme (FTP) has made the three countries realise that no natural window exists for the tournament.

“The problem that we’ve had is trying to find space. We all know that there is a lot of international cricket,” said New Zealand Cricket chief executive Justin Vaughan.

“We’ve got a lot of international cricket events like the World Twenty20. There’s the World Cup and then there is the Indian Premier League which takes place in April-May every year.”

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When cricket historians look back in years to come they may well decide that 2009 was the year that the Twenty20 format came of age. They will say this was the year when the unruly offspring joined the accepted family of cricket’s formats.

Perhaps not regarded as the ultimate test of a team’s ability, that will surely always be the five-match five-day Test series, but still a valid and recognised method of sorting out the cricketing men from the boys.

Why 2009? You may ask. Well two reasons. First the IPL was moved from its natural home in India due to security reasons for its second season prompting a multitude of questions.

Could the organisers and the South Africans hosts put on the event at such short notice? Yes, they could. Would it be as exciting as the inaugural season? Yes. Would the passion of the crowds transfer to South Africa? Would the playing standards reach the same levels? Would the best in the world still be queuing up to appear? Yes, yes and yes.

But there was one important question that was answered no. Would it surpass and replace international cricket?

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