Has cricket reached peak T20?

Dale Steyn should have been packing for Glasgow to play in the inaugural Euro T20 Slam. Instead he is fishing for golden dorado in the rivers of Bolivia.

TELFORD VICE in London

THE golden dorado is a magnificently bellied fish armed with a pronounced underbite on a face so fierce only a mother could love it. But it is indeed golden; from a deeply burnished tail to a massive gilt head, which frames a mouth snaggled with mean looking teeth.

If Tutankhamun’s tomb had included a fishtank amid all that other gold, it would have been stocked with these denizens, which are also known as river tigers or jaw characins, and, in Latin, Salminus brasiliensis. The biggest specimen yet measured was 1.3 metres long and weighed 34 kilogrammes.

Dale Steyn doesn’t want for records, but he has the chance to break that one in the coming days.

Steyn should have been packing for Scotland, where he was due to play for the Glasgow Giants in the inaugural Euro T20 Slam. Instead he is fishing for golden dorado in the rivers of Bolivia, where he has Quinton de Kock for company.

Sixteen other players besides Steyn who are or were South Africans were on the rosters of the six teams in a tournament that was to have been staged in Malahide — 18 kilometres north-east of Dublin — Edinburgh and Amstelveen, in Amsterdam, from August 30 to September 22. Lance Klusener and Herschelle Gibbs were to have coached the Giants and the Rotterdam Rhinos.

But, after days of speculation that something was up, the plug was pulled on the tournament on Wednesday because, organisers Bombay Sports Limited (BSL) and Woods Entertainment said in a statement, “funding partners and franchise owners of this exciting new T20 tournament have reluctantly come to the decision that staging of the event will not be possible in 2019”.

BSL also own the Global T20 Canada, where players refused to take the field on August 7 because they hadn’t been fully paid. Some who appeared in last year’s event are still waiting for their money.

The European league’s failure to launch is bad luck for Steyn, and even more so for those who were also signed but are in less demand — Robbie Frylinck, Corbin Bosch and Jon-Jon Smuts, for instance — and who probably can’t afford to make themselves feel better by going fishing in Bolivia.

Nevermind. Currently 39 men’s and women’s leagues are played in 22 countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and East Asia Pacific. Eighteen of them are franchise competitions.

In February 2016 the Gemini Arabians, captained by Virender Sehwag, beat Brian Lara’s Leo Lions in the final of the Masters Champions League, which was contested in Dubai and Sharjah by six squads of 15 players each, all of them former internationals. Jacques Kallis led the Libra Legends, Graeme Smith the Virgo Super Kings.

So recent events in Europe and Canada will make people wonder if the T in T20 stands for tipping point. Has world franchise cricket reached peak T20?

It’s an unavoidable question in South Africa, where the messy in-house politics around the stillborn T20 Global League has become the exponentially bigger mess that is the bottomless pit of debt called the Mzansi Super League (MSL), a shining example of what happens when ego and vanity usurp common sense, nevermind sound business practice.

The South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA) says, as part of their legal challenge to Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) proposed domestic restructuring plan, which could lead to 70 jobs being lost, that the money the MSL is bleeding hasn’t been factored into the R654-million CSA project they will lose in the four-year rights cycle that ends in 2022.

SACA estimate the MSL losses, added to the declining value of “per match” overseas broadcast revenues, will put the financial damage to cricket in South Africa by 2022 at close to R1-billion.

That sounds like a billion reasons to ditch the MSL, but it is set to be patched up and shoved back out there in November and December for its second edition.

T20 has carved its niché in the world game with astonishing speed, helped by the enthusiasm for the product of administrators who probably have a better understanding of exchange rates than they do of the importance of a bowler’s economy rate.

But, like every avenue of every sport, its credibility is dependent on the quality of player it attracts. And Steyn’s recent experience is worryingly instructive.

CSA acting director of cricket Corrie van Zyl told Sport24 that Steyn was not “medically ready” to play three T20s in India next month in the wake of the shoulder injury that forced him out of the World Cup.

When, last Tuesday, Steyn was left out of South Africa’s squad to play three T20s in India next month he grumbled on social media that CSA “obviously lost my number in the reshuffling of coaching staff”.

He wasn’t moaning about not being picked. He was unhappy about, apparently, not being told that he wouldn’t be picked. That’s no way to treat a senior player who has been loyal to the national cause when he could easily have gone the Kolpak route or become a T20 franchise mercenary.

South Africa’s T20s in India will be played from September 15 to 22, the last of them on the same day as the final of the Euro T20 Slam — which was to have featured Faf du Plessis, Imran Tahir, Tabraiz Shamsi, Dwaine Pretorius and Heinrich Klaasen along with Steyn and Smuts.

All of those players could be part of the 2020 T20 World Cup mix, and Pretorius, Shamsi and Smuts are in the squad for India. Will they stick around if they aren’t regarded with due respect?

Van Zyl told Times Select on Thursday that Steyn had not been issued with a no-objection certificate (NOC) to play in Europe, and Steyn’s agent, Dave Rundle, confirmed that the fast bowler had been waiting for his NOC, which he would have needed to turn out for Glasgow.

But not if he retired from South African cricket. And he’s clearly heading that way, having called time on his Test career.

So, careful CSA. The players you need more than anything know there are plenty more fish in the T20 sea.

First published by Times SELECT