Shane Warne was interviewed by Kevin Mitchell in the Guardian outlining his vision for Twenty20 cricket. With the Allen Stanford saga hitting the game as it tries to welcome more and more money Warney said that the authorities should focus purely focus on the IPL and stop trying copycat events. They should accept the IPL having got the competition right. The future of Twenty20 is far from set in stone for my money but lets see what Warney thinks . . .

“Playing for your country has to be number one. But, if common sense prevailed, the IPL would run for four weeks in April, with a week either side when there was no international cricket. Every player in the world would be available. Instead of everyone trying to copy the IPL, because it worked, they should support it and say, you know what, this is a great advertisement for this brand of cricket, worldwide. Twenty-four million viewers watched the final. Now there aren’t many sporting events where 24 million people watch it.”

Continue Reading

allen stanford, not quite as West Indian as Tony Crozier

This week has been a bad one for the newest form of our most dearly beloved game. It seemed that 2008 was the absolute watershed moment for the T20 format. The first season of the IPL, the Stanford Millions competition in the West Indies, and of course the T20 World Cup, won, appropriately, by India. But 2009, and particularly this past week, has proved a real test for the form known as ‘Hollywood Cricket’

The man at the centre of all of this is the American businessman Allen Stanford. Back in 2008 Stanford famously rolled into the home of cricket, Lords, with a basket full of money, and won quick friends.

His inaugural tournament, at the ground named in his honour in Antigua, saw a bunch of West Indian teams, play the best County side in England, and the England cricket team itself. From the get-go the competition had the real feeling of a farce. Why were West Indian players playing for a team called Stanford Superstars? Why would a national team involve itself in what was set-up as a franchise competition? The answer was of course the mighty dollar…in fact $20 Million or so.

Continue Reading

andrew flintoff and kevin pietersen are gonna be paid massive sums

Chennai Super Kings have bought Flintoff for $1.55million (£1.058m) while Bangalore Royal Challengers paid an identical sum for Pietersen. The total money spent was a fraction of last year with the only other mammoth figure being the purchase of rising South African superstar JP Duminy $950,000 to Mumbai Indians.

IPL Auction in Full . . .

Continue Reading

The second IPL auction is set to take place in Goa on February 6 and for the first time England players will feature. However the IPL have sprung some hefty surprises by including some England veterans – Darren Gough 38, Dominic Cork , 37 and Shaun Udal, 39. Out of the three veterans only Gough could realistically consider himself to be an England great. If his career wasn’t so badly hit by injury he surely would have been considered as such.

An IPL pay packet would be one hell of a pension for these old farts . . .

Continue Reading