The CLT20 circus got over today. I say circus because it has become a joke. BCCI has treated it as a domestic tournament, twisting rules at whim to suit the IPL teams. What is my problem with CLT20 you ask?
Well for the starters, why is IPL represented by 4 teams while all other countries have to settle for just 2 or even 1 team (that too has to go through the qualifiers)? Then too the financial clout of the IPL teams meant that players like Pollard who were eligible to represent other teams chose to represent IPL teams.
Even the allocation of teams that qualified for the group stages to Group A or Group B depended upon the final position of the sole IPL team in qualifiers, aka, KKR.
The IPL teams had the advantage of playing the matches at 8 pm when they did not have to suffer in the heat of the early evening unlike the non-IPL teams, most of whom weren’t acclimatized to this weather.
CSK magically gets to play the last league match in every edition so they know exactly what their position is and what they need to do to qualify. Unfortunately they couldn’t capitalize on it this time.
All this may sound like whining but if you look at it from a neutral’s perspective tell me honestly does all this sound fair to you. Do you not feel that everything is skewed to give some advantage to the IPL teams?
And all this for what? To maximize the number of matches involving the IPL sides purely due to the marketability of the matches in the biggest consumer market of cricket in the world, India. An all IPL final must have sent both the rates and demand for airtime during the match soaring.
So if the sole purpose of CLT20 was to make as much money as possible why not just make it a shorter IPL with 6 team involved? It will probably be a bigger money spinner. And then have a separate proper tournament to decide the best T20 team in the world where the leagues are represented equally by 2 teams from each league. And organize it in a nation where people would actually care about the contest like Australia, England, or South Africa.
Then maybe I will take CLT20 seriously.