What to do with Champions League T20?

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - FEBRUARY 13: Dean Elgar of the Titans during the Momentum One Day Cup final match between Nashua Cape Cobras and The Unlimited Titans from Sahara Park Newlands on February 13, 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo by Carl Fourie/Gallo Images)

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - FEBRUARY 13: Dean Elgar of the Titans during the Momentum One Day Cup final match between Nashua Cape Cobras and The Unlimited Titans from Sahara Park Newlands on February 13, 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo by Carl Fourie/Gallo Images)

Published May 22, 2015

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Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) chief executive Haroon Lorgat and president Chris Nenzani left for India ahead of talks which will determine the future of the Champions League T20 competition.

Reports in India in recent weeks suggest the tournament is to be scrapped, ostensibly because it failed to attract a big enough TV audiences in India.

Lorgat and Nenzani will meet with the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) new secretary Anurag Thakur, the board’s president Jagmohan Dalmiya and their counterparts from Cricket Australia (CA) – Wally Edwards and James Sutherland. The meeting will take place before the IPL final in Kolkata.

Scrapping the CLT20 would have a significant impact on the pockets of South African players who don’t have national contracts. Money earned as a result of CSA’s shareholding in the CLT20, makes up a major portion of player salaries domestically.

TV company Star Sports agreed a 10-year deal understood to be in the region of $900-million (about R1.06bn) when the competition was first mooted in the wake of the T20 explosion in the latter half of the last decade.

The CLT20 was initially conceived as a competition along similar lines to the lucrative European football tournament, involving the champion domestic T20 teams from all of cricket’s major nations.

However, the event never gained the traction initially hoped for, mainly on account of a lack of interest in India.

While cricket is the most popular sport in that vast nation, audiences are only attracted to the sport’s star names and matches between the Otago Volts and Cape Cobras didn’t create the desired excitement among TV viewers in India.

Though Star Sports’ deal runs out in 2019, the company wants to cut out of it early. Various changes had been made to the structure of the competition – including the controversial decision to increase the number of IPL sides to four – in order to build interest in India, but that failed to attract viewers.

The IPL remains an immensely popular competition in India attracting huge TV audiences, and there has been plenty of talk in Indian cricket circles in recent years to extend the IPL from its current eight week format to one that last 12 or even 16 weeks.

Indian media has reported that BCCI officials want to keep a version of the CLT20 tournament, that will resemble a ‘mini-IPL,’ keeping it restricted to just the top four teams of that year’s IPL competition.

How that would impact on CA and CSA is unknown, though it’s understood a big payout could be made to the two organisations to compensate for their losses.

If indeed the CLT20 is scrapped, it would be a sad demise for what was a good concept.

Unfortunately, it’s also indicative of the massive imbalance that has had a major impact on the sport internationally, too, where India’s financial clout has undermined the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, although not officially on the agenda for the talks in Kolkata, Lorgat and Nenzani will also discuss South Africa’s October Tour of India, which is expected to consist of four Tests, five ODIs and two T20 Internationals.

Relations between CSA and the BCCI have warmed since the acrimony of 2013 when the BCCI agreed to the bare minimum number of matches for India’s tour here at the end of that year.

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