A T20 Champions League is coming, and so is crunch time for Test cricket

5 hours ago 5

A men’s Twenty20 Champions League will be relaunched as soon as September next year, after the tournament was backed by key member countries at the International Cricket Council’s annual conference in Singapore.

Test cricket’s future and a possible split into two divisions may also be decided by the end of the year, after the ICC formalised a working group to reshape the game’s calendar from 2027 onwards, according to two sources with knowledge of confidential discussions.

Shane Watson batting for the Sydney Sixers in the first iteration of the T20 Champions League in 2012.

There is now a distinct possibility that the number of Test playing countries may be capped, on the basis that only a few currently make money from the game’s oldest format and that many nations do not have the resources to support the systems required for developing competitive Test teams.

Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg and Richard Gould, CEO of the England and Wales Cricket Board, will be among the eight members of the calendar working group, alongside the ICC’s new chief executive Sanjog Gupta.

It will be expected to present interim findings and recommendations to the ICC board, chaired by india’s Jay Shah, before the end of this year.

Gupta, the former head of sport at the Indian broadcast giant JioStar, was involved in the recent report into cricket’s calendar by the global players’ body. But he has also expressed the view that the market will dictate how much Test and international cricket is played in the future.

“You have to make hard choices,” Gupta said on the MCC’s World Cricket Connects panel at Lord’s in 2023. “And there are very clear indicators of what fans want. There is enough data to suggest what direction the game is going in.

“If you continue to serve a product that no one wants, one – that product will continue to suffer; and, two – the ecosystem around the product will continue to suffer. Blackberry disappeared at some point. It was a device that all of us had, it was a device that all of us were in the bait of using, then it disappeared, and it was replaced by another product.”

The first iteration of the T20 Champions League was launched in 2008 and lasted until 2014, before the company then known as ESPN Star cut its losses after paying an inflated rights fee of about $1 billion for the event, having lost out on the first rights to the Indian Premier League.

Cricket Australia, India’s BCCI and Cricket South Africa were partners in the league, and ESPN Star’s rights fees helped to provide the seed funding for the first few years of the Big Bash League, before it began to generate its own significant broadcast rights revenue in 2013.

Since then, the T20 franchise circuit has exploded, and one of numerous complexities for the Champions League will be determinations about which clubs players choose to play for. Some of the world’s top T20 players can take part in at least two and often as many as four or five different franchise leagues per year.

It has not yet been decided how the finances of the new league will be split. Lobbying has continued for a parallel concept where a circuit of T20 tournaments are hosted around the world, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, but the Kingdom’s future role may be as a potential host for the Champions League.

Among other decisions, the ICC board has approved a qualification model for the cricket tournament at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and also given the dysfunctional USA Cricket board a three-month deadline to meet a range of compliance goals. Should those terms not be met, the six-team tournaments for men and women at the LA Olympics will be run by the ICC directly.

A funding model for the refugee Afghanistan women’s cricket team has also been approved, with the players set to be supported to the tune of about $1 million per year, with a view to them trying to qualify for global events.

Australia, meanwhile, begin a Twenty20 series against the West Indies in Jamaica on Monday morning. Captain Mitch Marsh confirmed that he won’t be seen at the bowling crease for the foreseeable future, and intends to play as a batter only in all formats following a recent run of back problems.

Marsh also flagged a debut for the Hobart Hurricanes’ heavy hitter Mitch Owen, who was named MVP for the recent Major League Cricket tournament in the United States.

Matt Short finished the MLC with a side strain and has been ruled out of the series, meaning Jake Fraser-McGurk will open the batting with Marsh.

Travis Head, Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood have been rested.

Australia XI: Mitch Marsh (capt), Jake Fraser-McGurk, Josh Inglis, Cameron Green, Glenn Maxwell, Mitch Owen, Cooper Connolly, Ben Dwarshuis, Sean Abbott, Nathan Ellis, Adam Zampa.

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