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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Andrew Flintoff is giving serious consideration to becoming a freelancer cricketer according to his manager, Andrew Chandler, in a Sunday newspaper. Flintoff has already received a number of offers, but his recent knee surgery means he will be sidelined for at least six months. On Friday he was awarded an incremental contract by the ECB, but the option of lucrative Twenty20 deals will be very tempting.

Flintoff ’s freelancing would have followed the route expected to be taken by Australian allrounder, Andrew Symonds, who is also eyeing several Twenty20 opportunities around the world after his national career stalled due to disciplinary issues.

“He’ll play for Chennai [Super Kings in the IPL], he might play for an Australian team, a South African team, maybe one in the West Indies,” Chandler told the Observer. “If he hadn’t have been injured he would have probably played in December-January in Australia. And then at the end of January, early February in South Africa. I was already negotiating with them. We were negotiating with South Australia and the Durban team, the Nashua Dolphins. And there’s been an offer from Northern Transvaal [Northerns] as well.”

Flintoff is heading to Dubai for a three-month spell to aid his rehabilitation from a right knee surgery after was operated on a day after helping England regain the Ashes, his farewell Test series. He has targeted a return to full

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England have confirmed Kevin Pietersen will not be available for the Bangalore Royal Challengers in the upcoming Twenty20 Champions League.

The big-hitting batsman, 29, is currently recovering from surgery on his Achilles after missing out on the last three Ashes Tests.

That knock has also ruled him out of the current one-dayers with Australia, as well as the upcoming Champions Trophy in South Africa.

The Champions League, which features domestic Twenty20 teams from around the globe, runs from October 8 to October 23.

And eyebrows would have been raised if Pietersen’s first cricket since going under the knife was for his super-rich Indian Premier League side.

But England are the ones who decide player availability under the terms of their central contracts.

Matt Prior will not be in action for Twenty20 Cup winners Sussex, with the wicketkeeper ordered to rest.

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England’s latest Twenty20 opening partnership of Ravi Bopara and Joe Denly must reflect that there are easier places to press a World Cup claim than during a rainy week in Manchester.

Thirteen pairings in 21 matches sums up England’s confusion at the top of the order in 20-over cricket, and productivity reached a new low as both batsmen were dismissed within seven legitimate balls at Old Trafford yesterday before rain ruled out the first of two Twenty20 ties against Australia.

The second Ashes T20 is scheduled for Manchester under floodlights tomorrow evening, but more rain is forecast. Another Twenty20 World Cup arrives with indecent haste in the West Indies at the end of April, and there are only a further two Twenty20 clashes in South Africa in November to establish their claims.

It was a deflating debut for the Denly/Bopara combo. Denly, on his one-day debut, hooked at his first ball from Brett Lee, but holed out at backward square leg as Lee’s frustrations over an inactive Ashes series seemed to be poured into one 90mph head-high bouncer. Bopara’s nonentity of a shot at Mitchell Johnson neatly transferred his horrors in the Test series to the 20-over game, indicating that a change of format will not automatically bring about a change of fortune.

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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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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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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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The composition of the First Division for the inaugural season of P20 - Durham, Hampshire Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Sussex and Warwickshire - is now known but the counties are still uncertain how much the new competition might be worth to them.

The ECB are believed to be close to concluding a broadcasting deal with ESPN-Star Sports but counties are anxiously awaiting details of the likely sums involved as they prepare to draw up their playing budgets for next season.

“We have had no financial details from the ECB about how much the P20 is likely to be worth to us,” said David Smith, chief executive of Leicestershire who secured their place in the P20 elite by finishing third in the North group of the Twenty20 Cup.

“In terms of player recruitment we need to know how much we might be talking about so that we can plan our recruitment and manage our squad accordingly.”

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