T20 leagues keep popping up year after year. Just last year, three T20 franchise tournaments (MLC, SA20, and ILT20) came into being. This combined with other big leagues like the IPL, PSL, BBL, The Hundred, and an action-packed international schedule, and you’ll probably understand why the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has decided to pit PSL against the IPL next year.
Cooperation not ‘rocket science’
It’s not just the IPL and PSL clashing; Major League Cricket (MLC) and The Hundred will start just 6 days apart. The SA20, ILT20, and PSL already clashed this year, and it seems like next year isn’t going to be much better. As all of this happens, Caribbean Premier League’s (CPL) CEO, Pete Russell, has asked all the cricketing boards to cooperate to ensure that all the franchise leagues coexist and function properly.
His biggest frustration was the late announcement of the schedule, citing MLC as an example. “They’ve only just come out with their schedule,” he said while talking with ESPNcricinfo. “Why does it take leagues so long to put a schedule together? We have all year to figure it out.”
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Russell also hopes that boards find some common ground and communicate with each other so that all leagues function properly. “I hope that [collaboration] continues. It’s not rocket science; it’s what should happen with all leagues. It’s just a nonsense that we’ve got all this overlap when it just needs to be worked through. Scheduling is a challenge, I know, but it can’t be that you have two leagues going at each other at the same time. To my mind, it doesn’t make any sense,” the CPL CEO added.
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