Theatre of the absurd
The Champions League Twenty20 is a tournament searching for an identity
Tariq Engineer
25-Feb-2013
The Champions League Twenty20 is a tournament searching for an identity. It is an international tournament played by domestic teams, a concept foreign to cricket and its fan. Certain players have also wound up playing for their IPL teams rather than their home sides, adding to the confusion. The end result is an event that doesn’t make you want to watch it, writes Venkat Ananth on Yahoo.
My problem with the Champions League begins with the concept. Memory being notoriously short, here's a quick history lesson: In 2000-'01, you had a tournament in Perth called the "Champions Cup" played towards the end of the Australian domestic season, which was loosely modeled on the FIFA World Club Championship, and was meant to discover the best domestic one-day side in the world. Mumbai, Kwazulu-Natal, Central Districts and hosts Western Australia featured in the tournament, but soon after its debut it was sadly disbanded. My guess is it didn't work as well as the organizers hoped it would, and the whole 'international domestic cricket' schtick wasn't as commercially viable or capable of generating as much spectator interest as the organizers believed.
Tariq Engineer is a former senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo