As it is with England who have embraced T20 with the announcement of the English Premier League (had the IPL not come first would they, to borrow from Wimbledon and the British Open golf, have merely called it The League?). It was inevitable that they would go with 18 teams, one for each county, rather than a mixed group of players representing a poorly defined team. The history of sport, and of television, has shown that fans need clearly defined teams to express their loyalties.

The stage is set then for the football model where there will be T20 leagues in each country; some more lucrative than others. That is why I was amused when I read of a proposal in England to ‘counter’ the IPL. You don’t need to. The Bundesliga exists, so does La Liga as does the EPL. And France, Belgium and Turkey and everybody else has its own league. The leagues with bigger markets draw the better players, the smaller leagues effectively become feeder leagues and that is how it could well be with cricket. Having said that, it raises the question of how much T20 cricket is good for the game.

The key here is the definition of the “game” as we have traditionally known it. If the “game” is Test cricket, it is a valid question but I don’t think any one person decides what the “game” is. The markets decide. We didn’t decide how much rap was good for the music world, people buying cds did. We didn’t decide how much of computer animation and special effects was good for the storytelling style of movie-making. The box-office decided that. So too it will be with T20 cricket. If we believe we can control how much T20 should be played, we will seed another Packer for human enterprise fuelled by finance will always find a way.

... contd.