Making Caribbean Cricket great again

Tue, Aug 7, '18

The sixth edition of the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) begins in Trinidad on Wednesday with the league's chief, Pete Russell, bullish about the tournament's strength in the face of an uncertain future for global T20 competitions.

Given the proliferation of such tournaments, and with South Africa and England hoping to add to the likes of the CPL, India's IPL and Australia's Big Bash, the ICC are currently looking at various measures designed to ensure the continued primacy of international cricket. These include limiting the number of T20 competitions a player can play in a calendar year to three and having discreet blocks of time, outside of which the tournaments can't be played.

For all the world's T20 tournaments, including the CPL, that poses a significant danger but Pete Russel believes his tournament can cope with any restriction on the number of tournaments a player can play. "The pool is big enough and deep enough," he tells Cricbuzz. "What you don't want of course is to have is a situation where players or agents start to trade off different leagues.

"You could have scenarios where a player says they will come to you but you've got to pay me 50% more than you paid me last time otherwise I'm going to go elsewhere. You could create a false market which is in nobody's interest. But we've built a very strong brand already and we think if someone had the choice of three tournaments, we believe we'd be one of them."

read the full article at cricbuzz