New Twenty20 threatens county structure
"Although its architects will deny the charge of plagiarism, the similarities between the radical new Twenty20 competition leaked yesterday and the Indian Premier League (IPL) are so clear that it seems the ground-breaking tournament has simply been
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
"Although its architects will deny the charge of plagiarism, the similarities between the radical new Twenty20 competition leaked yesterday and the Indian Premier League (IPL) are so clear that it seems the ground-breaking tournament has simply been transported thousands of miles from Bombay to London," writes Richard Hobson in the Times.
In a different slot, the New T20, as it would be called, is being projected as a complement rather than a rival to the IPL. The organisers will save themselves a lot of tedious politicking with Lalit Modi and his friends on the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) if they can make friends early. But the tone of the early part of the document written by Keith Bradshaw, the MCC chief executive, and David Stewart, the Surrey chairman, is that England must act quickly to ensure that India, already the biggest market for the world game, does not gain a monopoly on the most lucrative staging of the format.
Also in the Times, Christopher Martin-Jenkins writes, "Profits are estimated, with questionable precision, at £7 million a team, but let us have some cricketing honesty here. It should be either this revamped nine-team extravaganza with profits genuinely shared, or a continued county league. In a properly balanced programme there is no realistic place for both."
"The Twenty20 format proposed by the Marylebone Cricket Club, Hampshire, Lancashire and Surrey is imaginative and has some merit but it threatens the fabric of the domestic game in England. Despite what the project team state, the creation would cause an insurmountable split among the 18 first-class counties. It threatens overkill of Twenty20 cricket, a product that has achieved so much good in the six years since its inception," writes Angus Fraser in the Independent.
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo