T20 is eating international game
T20 players are seeking more lucrative contracts with franchise leagues — to the detriment of other formats, writes Tim Wigmore of the Telegraph
The long golden age of international cricket is over. Recently, the representatives of national boards met in Birmingham, where they attempted to work out how the international game could coexist alongside the growth of domestic Twenty20 leagues. Increasingly, it is obvious that, rather than leagues having to fit around the international game, the international game will have to find space between leagues.
Evidence of this shift is not hard to find.
South Africa cancelled one-day internationals in Australia, endangering their own World Cup berth, so their players can be available for their new T20 tournament in January. That month also brings the launch of the International League T20, in the United Arab Emirates, which allows nine overseas players per side, with top players earning £373,000 ($718,000); together with Australia’s Big Bash and the Bangladesh Premier League, it will mean four major T20 leagues running concurrently.
The teams in the two new leagues in the UAE and South Africa have been hoovered up by Indian Premier League owners, who have bought each South African side and half of those in the UAE; one other UAE team are owned by Lancer Capital, led by Manchester United owner Avram Glazer.
Meanwhile, the negotiations for the new men’s Future Tours Programme show that England and Australia have carved out windows for their short-format leagues, while the IPL is expanding to 21⁄2 months, during which there is no international cricket.
David Warner has reportedly requested to be released from his Cricket Australia contract so that, during the height of the home summer, he can play in the UAE league.
It adds to an inescapable sense: international cricket is embattled like never before. Power is shifting away from the international game, which is struggling beyond World Cups and marquee bilateral series — those involving Australia, England and India.
Ideas once considered absurd have come to seem plausible.
Perhaps the most significant is for franchises to contract players all year.
As the new leagues in the UAE and South Africa attest, IPL teams are eyeing up buying teams abroad — a similar model to Manchester City with City Football Group. If rules on recruitment are shifted, this could lead to players being contracted to one franchise: so that, say, a cricketer represented all four of the Knight Riders franchises in different leagues.
“That would be nirvana,” says Venky Mysore, the chief executive of Kolkata Knight Riders. “Hopefully, some day it will happen.”
Already, some of a franchise’s most valuable assets — such as Andre Russell and Sunil Narine — often do fitness and training work with the team during the IPL off-season.
The rise of freelance cricketers, principally from the West Indies, has been one feature of cricket’s new age. But 12-month contracts, potentially for multiple years, would represent another stage in this evolution, giving T20 specialists security.
The relationship between club and country would be more like football, with players financially dependent on their clubs. For many players, central contracts with national boards would seem like an unwanted encumbrance.
The idea of windows for domestic T20 leagues has long been discussed.
Yet such is cricket’s trajectory that the notion is the wrong way around: it is international cricket, not leagues, that will require their own window.
A senior figure on the T20 franchise circuit predicts that there will soon be three blocks a year in which there is no major international cricket. First, from mid-january to mid-february, when the leagues in Australia, Bangladesh, South Africa and UAE will be played; then from late March to June, during the IPL; and finally in July or August, when the Hundred, the Caribbean Premier League and Major League Cricket, which launches next year in the United States, are played.
Private investment has driven the huge sums players will earn in the UAE and South Africa. IPL franchises are interested in investing in the Hundred, if — as seems possible — it is opened up for private investment. Mysore and others hope that the array of IPL owners of other T20 leagues is a gateway to Indian players being permitted to appear in foreign leagues.
Traditionally, close relationships between national boards aimed to secure the most attractive international fixtures. But politicking might move into a new realm: working together for the betterment of domestic short-format leagues, which could be desirable for all leagues bar the IPL.
Sameen Rana, the chief operating officer of Lahore Qalandars, the Pakistan Super League champions, advocates “Pakistan, Australia and England having some kind of an understanding where the cricketing boards should support each other and reciprocate the availability of the players” in their leagues. He has had discussions around creating a memorandum of understanding where the countries agree to make players available for each other’s leagues.
There remain significant unanswered questions for insurgent leagues. No T20 league has yet generated a lucrative following overseas. The history of T20 leagues attests to the perils of boards believing that they can generate a sizeable Indian audience.
South Africa and the UAE both previously scrapped T20 leagues before the first ball, although the new UAE league has a $150 million broadcasting deal over its first 10 years.
Yet nearly all matches not involving Australia, England and India now lose money for the host board. South Africa even lost money hosting Australia and England in
2019. When Cricket West Indies hosted Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in 2018, it lost a net $22 million from the two series.
And so a new cricketing calendar is swiftly crystallising. National boards will prioritise their own T20 leagues; international fixtures will be fitted around them, with all bar the most lucrative treated as an encumbrance to be dropped at the flimsiest excuse.
In time, many leagues might be nearly as long as the IPL; for the IPL, this length is surely part of a journey, not the final destination. Indeed, in many ways, owners buying teams in overseas leagues can be viewed as a way to gain greater control of the calendar: part of a journey, perhaps, to an IPL of at least four months. Other leagues will need to accept being at several tiers below the IPL, like midsized European football leagues in the shadow of the Premier League.
Like in football, global international tournaments will remain vibrant; a select few bilateral international series should do so, too.
But exactly what else there is room for, in a world in which the primacy of international cricket is shattered, has never been less clear.
— Telegraph Group UK