Lorgat, Nenzani to India for talks
CRICKET South Africa’s chief executive Haroon Lorgat and president Chris Nenzani left for India last night ahead of talks which will determine the future of the Champions League T20 competition.
Reports in India in recent weeks suggest the tournament is to be scrapped, ostensibly because it failed to attract a big enough TV audience in India.
Lorgat and Nenzani will meet with the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s new secretary Anurag Thakur, the board’s president Jagmohan Dalmiya and their counterparts from Cricket Australia, Wally Edwards and James Sutherland. The meeting will take place before Sunday’s IPL final in Kolkata.
Scrapping the CLT20 would have a significant impact on the pockets of South African players who don’t have national contracts.
Money earned as a result of CSA’s shareholding in the CLT20, makes up a major portion of player salaries domestically.
TV company Star Sports agreed a 10-year deal understood to be in the region of $900-million (about R1bn) when the competition was first mooted in the wake of the T20 explosion in the latter half of the last decade.
The CLT20 was initially conceived as a competition along similar lines to the lucrative European football tournament, involving the champion domestic T20 teams from all of cricket’s major nations.
However, the event never gained the traction initially hoped for, mainly on account of a lack of interest in India.
While cricket is the most popular sport in that vast nation, audiences are only attracted to the sport’s star names and matches between the Otago Volts and Cape Cobras didn’t create the desired excitement among TV viewers in India.
Though Star Sports’ deal runs out in 2019, the company wants to cut out of it early. Various changes had been made to the structure of the competition – including the controversial decision to increase the number of IPL sides to four – in order to build interest in India, but that failed to attract viewers.
The IPL remains an immensely popular competition in India attracting huge TV audiences.