IPL teams don’t always get their way at CLT20

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

THE brazen attempts to ensure that Indian teams dominate the Champions League T20 (CLT20) have succeeded only half as well as they might have.

Of the 10 finalists in the CLT20 tournaments played so far, just five have come from the Indian Premier League (IPL) - despite the fields of 10 or 12 sides having been spiked with three or four IPL sides each year. Moreover, in 2009 and 2012 all the Indian outfits were eliminated before the final.

But the preferential treatment shines through in the fact that IPL teams have won the CLT20 three times out of five. Every time an Indian side have reached the final, they have won.

India are the only country who are guaranteed at least three places in the CLT20 line-up. SA and Australia have two each, and one is reserved for a West Indian team. Other countries’ sides scrap it out in the qualifying tournament that precedes the event proper.

“It is unfair, but we have to accept that all the money for the tournament comes from India,” Geoff Toyana, who coached the Lions all the way to the final in 2012, said on Wednesday of the CLT20 format.

The 2014 edition of the tournament, which started in Hyderabad on Wednesday with a game between the Chennai Super Kings and the Kolkata Knight Riders, features Kings XI Punjab as the third IPL franchise.

SA’s representatives, the Cobras and the Dolphins, get their campaigns going with matches against Northern Districts and the Perth Scorchers on Friday and Saturday.

Other South Africans playing include Faf du Plessis, David Miller, Jacques Kallis and Neil McKenzie, who will turn out for the Chennai Super Kings, Punjab, Kolkata, and the Barbados Tridents.

The Cobras will have to make do without Dale Steyn, who has been rested on Cricket SA (CSA) orders, and JP Duminy, who has a knee injury.

That the acrimony between the SA and Indian boards last season, which saw India’s tour here reduced from a proposed 12 to five matches and with that the reported loss of R319-million in projected revenue, still lingers can be read into the CLT20 denying the Cobras permission to replace Duminy in their squad.

Narayanaswami Srinivasan, the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), also chairs the CLT20 governing council. He has been at loggerheads with CSA chief executive Haroon Lorgat since the latter’s days as chief executive of the International Cricket Council.

Indications last summer were that Srinivasan was bent on ending CSA’s shareholding in the CLT20, which is owned by the BCCI, CSA and Cricket Australia. The issue could come to a head if the governing council meets during the tournament, as has been mooted.

This year’s trio of Indian teams might have been joined by the Mumbai Indians, but they were beaten to the punch by New Zealand’s Northern Districts and the Lahore Lions in the qualifying round.

Which makes 2014 the first time that Mumbai, the only two-time winners of the CLT20 having taken the crown in 2011 and 2013, will not be involved.

“That was quite nice,” Toyana said of Mumbai’s demise. “But I’ll be surprised if any team outside of the IPL sides challenge for the title.”