Afternoon:
9°c
Am I the only one suffering from an uncontrollable urge to go rushing into the street shouting "STOP?" The cricket world is in serious danger of spinning wildly out of control as administrators, desperate not to miss the boat - or should it be gravy train? - rush headlong into setting up Twenty20 tournaments which, on first impression, seem spurious and ill-thought through.
The latest of these, the Champions League, promises five million dollars to the winner, but look beyond the headlines and there are all manner of problems.
This League is a lame excuse to cobble some teams together to play a Twenty20 series which can be flogged to broadcasters.
The finalists from the domestic Twenty20 competitions in England, Australia, India and South Africa will meet up - probably in Abu Dhabi - for the right to call themselves some sort of champion.
But champion of what? Certainly not the world because, notably, teams from West Indies, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, are missing.
Actually, they will be champions of nothing at all, but such is the current - with the emphasis very much on current - appeal of cricket to Asian television companies that the successful champions of nothing at all will pick up more than two million quid!
What a bonanza that promises to be for any lucky English county. But such will be their desire to compete for the chance to win their fortune, that their focus might be deflected from what some fear is the real aim of this tournament, which is the desire of the Indian cricket board (BCCI) to kill off the Indian Cricket League (ICL) which runs in competition to their own Indian Premier League (IPL).
There is a concern that English counties are being used as pawns in a wider game, because any cricketer who has appeared in the ICL faces the possibility of being barred from the Champions League.
Take Lancashire as an example. They have Lou Vincent and Stuart Law, both excellent Twenty20 cricketers who both appeared in the 'rebel' ICL.
What does the Lancashire selection committee do on Wednesday? Choose them, and risk not qualifying for the Champions League? Or leave them out - because that is the deterrent the BCCI want to set to 'rebel' players - and thereby run the risk of being knocked out early?
What will the effect be on the rest of Lancashire's players if they are told that Law or Vincent has been chosen?
They will know before a ball has been bowled, that there is a good chance they have kissed goodbye to a small fortune through no fault of their own. Will someone tell me what this does for the credibility of the Champions League, and why we are allowing these serious distractions to damage our own successful Twenty20 competition?
The great challenge for the game's administrators is to use Twenty20 carefully, sparingly and intelligently: to protect it from the dangers of overexposure. If this is done prudently, it will ensure that all forms of cricket will be bankrolled for years. Sadly, there is the real threat of television coverage of Twenty20 competitions reaching saturation point, not merely for the TV companies, but for the viewers who will surely start to tire of wall-to-wall coverage of games that mean something only to a very few and nothing to the vast majority.
If broadcasting revenue starts to dry up, the consequences will be swift and dire. Cricket's exciting future will have been destroyed by short-term opportunism. We are beyond the crossroads, and urgently need a U-turn.
Tomor row comes the of f icial announcement of another Twenty20 competition involving England, this one financed by the Texan billionaire, Sir Allen Stanford.
He is on record as describing Test cricket as 'boring'. Do you really need convincing any further?
