Cricket West Indies’ Commercial and Marketing Director, Dominic Warne, is “sitting on the fence” when it comes to the idea of having a second Caribbean T20 tournament to go alongside the Caribbean Premier Leauge.
Englishman Warne, who appeared on the Mason and Guest radio programme recently was asked to share his views on the possibility of having that tournament materialized.
The Commercial and Marketing Director pointed out that the development of local talent is at the forefront of any discussion of this nature but a lot of other things need to be factored in.
“The bigger issue now at the moment is the international calendar and what that means for international player availability,” he said.
“The IPL [Indian Premier League] sucks such a huge window out of every cricket organization around the world and it’s just done it again,” he added.
Warne reasoned that the timing of the IPL has severely impacted the plans, particularly that of West Indies in terms of their schedule.
“Whilst it does start getting cricket moving again economically in terms of distribution of funds, the fact that you have IPL in October-November this year, and then you’re going to have another one in April-May just essentially removed four months of the international year that no team can play international cricket and that is a problem, even more so for the West Indies because economically that April-May window used to be such a prime for us in terms of overseas tours, we don’t need the tours in January, February and March because from a tourism perspective, the tourists locations do very well so that April-May window used to be fantastic and we used to have some amazing tours then,” he stated.
Another aspect that Warne was in consideration of was the balance in distribution of the T20 product and was wary of the effects of producing too much.
“I think the other thing we also got to be careful that there is not too much T20 cricket going on just on people’s screens and TV because people can get tired of a good product quickly,” he opined.
Warne gave an example.
“It actually happened in England when they launched T20 back in 2002-2003. The first two years were fantastic but it tailed off quite quickly and England has taken a lot of work to get it back…so you can see why I am on the fence from the reasons I’ve given.”
Nevertheless, the CWI Director of Marketing was of the opinion that the International Cricket Council will have good debates on the topic but predicted that within the next three years it would be very tough to fit any new tournament due to the rescheduling of previous tours affected by Covid-19.
Also, veteran journalist and cricket commentator, Fazeer Mohammed questioned if it was economically feasible to pull off a second tournament in the region where it is usually expensive to host competitions.
Mohammed argued that with a territory versus territory system, fewer players from a territory would be involved since a lot of players play in a franchise that does not represent their home territory
Back in 2013 the Caribbean Premier League entered into a contractual agreement with West Indies Cricket Board that entailed 50 years exclusivity
