Today the England & Wales Cricket Board finally made an official announcement about the until-now-mythical English Premier League. The results are something of a mixed bag.
On the good side, the Pro-40 tournament is now officially dead and buried. This is a good thing. Having two one-day tournaments with slightly different rules was not a smart thing to be doing.
But what do we have instead? Two Twenty20 tournaments. More of this later.
Still with the good, the ECB has chucked out the proposal for a break-away league containing only the richest counties. Instead they will have a two-tier competition with promotion and relegation between the divisions. This is proven to work in the County Championship, so hopefully it will work for the EPL as well.
And now the bad stuff. Firstly, the competition is going to be played in June, when everyone knows the weather is awful. So a good number of the matches are going to get rained off.
Next, there is a proposal to include two invitational teams from overseas. One of these is rumored to be the “Stanford All Stars”, which will doubtless be a West Indies side. The other is rumored to be the winner of the IPL. What’s wrong with this? Well to start with it continues to daft and arrogant idea that English Twenty20 cricket is the pinnacle of the game and that other national competitions should simply act as qualification tournaments for it. If I were Lalit Modi I would send a large raspberry in the general direction of the ECB.
Besides, what does this do to the promotion and relegation system? Suppose Chennai were to win the IPL, but have a run of bad luck in the EPL and get relegated. Next year Mumbai wins the IPL. Why should they have to play in the second division? I have a sneaking suspicion that the invitational teams would be immune from relegation (otherwise they wouldn’t come), and that’s going to cause all sorts of resentment.
There was apparently some concern on Sky today about where the ECB would find the 4 overseas players per team (18 x 4 = 72) plus two invitational squads (at least 24) that the ECB proposed. However, I can’t find anywhere that the ECB mentions 4 overseas players per team, except in this BBC article, where it is clear that the whole thing is a rumor spread by Agnew in yet another pathetic attempt to discredit Twenty20.
But the really daft thing about the proposal is the idea of having two Twenty20 competitions. And not only that, but the EPL, which is supposed to be the premier competition, won’t feed through to the Twenty20 Champions League. That honor will go to the top two teams in the other competition. Why? What possible purpose is served by having a so-called premier competition that doesn’t feed through to international competition.
Look, suppose the FA said that they were going to invite the winners of La Liga and Serie A to play in the Premiership, but that Champions League places would go to the top teams in the Championship. Everyone would laugh, right? So why do we have to have this sort of nonsense in cricket?
Yes, yes, I know. Because sports administrators are bunch of stupid old men in blazers, most of whom probably sleep through the meetings due to having had too much wine with their lunch.
Oh well, maybe they will at least learn from experience and make sure that the rules on player eligibility also include wording to make clear what happens to teams that field an ineligible player. (And if you don’t know what I’m referring to there, you really, really do not want to know.)