Cash-rich league’s future on tenterhooks

hosts the mega tournament for cricket’s shortest format.

There are two big problems for Australia. One is just quarantining 16 teams that will participate in the T20 WC. Carting these squads around the country would increases the risk of Covid contamination. Restricting the tournament to one or two cities would rob the tournament of flavour.

Then, there’s the financial aspect. Allowing spectators into cricket stadia is still not finalised. And if it is, gate money being reduced by 75 per cent makes for an unappealing money proposition. Matches only for TV audiences does not make it lucrative for either CA or ICC. The value of broadcast rights for the T20 WC is not as humungous as say the IPL’s, which is the argument being covertly propagated by the BCCI. As it is Cricket Australia is currently beleaguered and in such a financial mess that CEO Kevin Roberts had to resign recently.

Job losses in the administration have been huge. Investments running into millions of dollars made by CA have gone bust in the havoc that the pandemic has wreaked.

In this bleak scenario, Australia would be happy to forego the T20 WC put full full attention on the Test series against India which promises to be a blockbuster. More interesting in the current circumstances, however, has been the Pakistan Cricket Board’s position that the T20 World Cup may be unfeasible this year. Chairman Ehsan Mani last week pretty much echoed CA chairman Edding’s sentiment, which means one hurdle less for the IPL2020 going ahead.

Indeed, Mani has said that Australia could be given the opportunity to host the T20 WC in 2022 instead of this year. Is the PCB chairman reaching out to the BCCI to ‘normalise’ bilateral cricket relations between the two countries? Pakistan has been yearning to play India for a few years now, and perhaps Mani an opportunity.

In this encouraging scenario for the IPL, though, the ICC has struck a discordant note. A decision on the T20 WC was to be announced on June 10. This has been deferred yet again by a month or so, which means the issue of the IPL is kept dangling.

Some have ascribed this deferrment to ICC chairman Shashank Manohar’s frosty relationship with the BCCI. Manohar finishes his tenure July-end and may have decided to pass on the contentious decision to scrap the T20 WC to his successor. But there’ a compelling counter-argument too. There is no guarantee that India will be senses free of the Covid19 threat in the next 2-3 months. In which case, calling off the T20 WC now would be premature. What if, after all the brouhaha, the IPL is not played for health reasons?

In an ideal scenario, both the World Championship and IPL should be possible, failing which at least one of the two tournament. If neither is played, it would be a double whammy that would severely dent the credibility of the ICC.

The strongest influence on how the second half of this unravels in cricket belongs neither to the ICC, BCCI or any crickeet board. As in the first half, it depends entirely on how Covid-19 behaves.