Twenty 20 Blog

South Africa captain Graeme Smith has pulled out of next month’s Champions League Twenty20 tournament in order to ensure he is fit to face England.

Smith, who plays for the Cape Cobras, has been struggling with a leg injury, despite scoring 141 in a losing cause against England on Sunday.

The inaugural Champions League gets under way on 8 November, with the Cobras in action against Bangalore.

England’s 10-week tour begins with a warm-up game on 6 November.

The tour includes two Twenty20 internationals, five one-day internationals and four Tests.

Smith is set to miss the next four to six weeks as he recovers from the injury.

“After much discussion and deliberation, the Proteas’ management, together with the medical committee of Cricket South Africa, have made a decision to withdraw Graeme from the upcoming Champions League in India,” said national team manager Dr Mohammed Moosajee.

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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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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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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 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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Tim Evershed of Twenty20Blog.co.uk shares his ultimate World Twenty20 2009 team, in batting order:

1) Tillakaratne Dilshan

Dilshan was the worthy winner of the ICC’s Player of the Tournament award and despite his failure in the final we had no hesitation in putting him first on our team of the World Cup.
His stats are compelling enough, most runs in the tournament (317), highest score (96), and average of 56 and a strike rate of 144.75.
But Dilshan’s story was about more than just numbers, he was the rock of Sri Lanka’s batting – scoring well over half the team total in the semi against West Indies – and he did it in style. To cap it all he invented a new shot and had it named after him, the gravity-defying ‘Dilscoop’ and was agonisingly short of the only century of the tournament.

2) Chris Gayle

If the tournament needed setting alight, which is arguable after The Netherlands win over England in the opener, it was Gayle that lit the blue touch paper with his innings at The Oval on the second day. Six sixes and six fours, the 88 he scored off the Australian bowlers was a thing of savage beauty.

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As befits a game where the importance of every scrambled single, every dropped catch and every dot ball is magnified, the players within the boundary rope were not the only ones feeling the pressure as the ICC World Twenty20 Cup began inauspiciously almost a fortnight ago. When drizzle came down at Lord’s, Alesha Dixon put away her microphone and the opening ceremony was cancelled, the doom mongers who predicted the tournament would fail to catch the public imagination were sharpening their pencils.

Everyone from ECB chairman Giles Clarke, praying it would help banish thoughts of a tumultuous winter, to sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe, hoping it could kick off a so-called “golden decade” of British sporting events in style, was looking worried. Two weeks later, it is a very different story. Outside the Oval yesterday, fans were effusive in their praise. John Fisher, sporting an England shirt, said it had been “brilliant” and was simply “a great day out”. His friend Tony Koodie, backing the West Indies, added: “It’s great value for money, great entertainment. It brings in the kids, and there’s a lot more women.” They were agreed on one other thing, however: “The dancers are dreadful!” After that soggy opening, the sun has shone, both metaphorically and literally. Twenty20 has come of age as a sporting proposition as well as an entertainment one and, after a winter of discontent that took in the Stanford debacle and security concerns sparked by the Lahore attack on the Sri Lanka team bus, international cricket’s feelgood factor is back.

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