More to be revealed from T20 Global League
AUGUST will be an action month for South Africa’s T20 Global League, with a number of exciting announcements lined up for cricket fans in the next few weeks.
All the franchise owners attended a workshop by Cricket SA (CSA) held in Dubai at the weekend – with a number of topics being covered, including corruption in cricket.
This week, CSA will be in Johannesburg for further planning and discussions.
Port Elizabeth team owner Ajay Sethi will then travel to Nelson Mandela Bay next week, where he plans to reveal his new team’s logo and name.
The player draft or auction has been set for August 19 and Port Elizabeth fans will then know who will join CSA marquee player Imran Tahir in what Sethi calls the people’s franchise.
“We are travelling to Johannesburg this week and have plans to officially unveil our logo next week,” Sethi told Dubai newspaper Khaleej Times at the workshop.
“We already have a name for the team. It will be a people’s franchise. I will tell them I’m just the co-owner. The ownership will be the people,” Sethi said.
“We are hoping to have a dream team. We have Imran Tahir at the moment.
“There are almost 400 players in the draft. We have a fair idea about what we want,” he said.
There is also the matter of announcing the coach of the franchise and support staff, likely to happen before the player draft.
The tournament will start in early November and finish with the final on December 16. CSA recently announced the appointment of experienced sports management professional Russell Adams as the director of the tournament.
Not only does Cape Town-born Adams have intimate knowledge of how cricket is run in South Africa, but he has also worked as consultant to the Kolkata Knight Riders and been vice-president of the commercial, operations and cricket academy of the Royal Challengers Bangalore.
CSA chief executive Haroon Lorgat told Khaleej Times: “All our plans are on track. Pretty much, if you go back to when we did the global launch of the league and the invitation to tender, which was on February 4, all of our plans have so far been on track.
“We wanted to launch the logo of the league on May 31, and we did, the owners on June 19, and the player draft we are looking at somewhere late in August. “So far, so good,” Lorgat said. CSA also underlined the importance of ridding the game of corruption. In South Africa, seven players were banned from the game recently for crooked dealings in the domestic T20 competition.
About the workshop, Sethi said: “The thing that has impressed me most about this league was the anticorruption measures.”