Best of the T20, more imports and State's mistake

 The next time Andrew Eade, David Cooper, Blair Furlong, Gavin Larsen, Lee Germon and Ross Dykes get together for a chinwag about the state of domestic cricket, one of the items on the unofficial agenda may well be: "What the hell are we going to call the domestic cricket competitions?" The Championship, The Shield and The Twenty20 are all we have at the moment after State pulled the pin this month or as it was put officially:

"New Zealand Cricket has confirmed it is exploring new sponsorship opportunities for its domestic cricket programmes next summer..."

But another more interesting conversation for the CEOs of the provincial branch offices of NZC would be around whether New Zealand should relax its rules around the use of offshore players in our domestic cricket competitions.

At present, the major association teams are allowed to have one "import" with no ties to New Zealand in each team, hence the appearance of blokes like Stephen Croft (Auckland), Dimitri Mascarenhas (Otago), the Indian team's roped-in Test specialists Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Murali Vijay, Amit Mishra, Dhawal Kulkarni and Laxmipathi Balaji), Hamish Marshall (ND), and of course Graham Napier (Wellington):

"Graham has been preparing for this breakthrough for such a long time he is now able to take the plaudits in his stride where many may have become sidetracked by such new-found fame..." (More outrageous dribbling hyperbole at his website.)

Having pledged allegiance to New Zealand's red stars, the Saffer-born trio of Neil Wagner (Otago), Johann Myburgh and Kruger van Wyk (Canterbury) are all classed as non-imports, although none are yet available for the full New Zealand side.

With the admission of the champion domestic Twenty20 team to the BCCI's multimillion-dollar Champions League Money Scramble starting on October 8 in India, the stakes for domestic cricket have soared. With that increased focus comes an increased desire to win, and it is a reasonable expectation that the provincial CEOs will be working out a way to negotiate the inevitable politics that will ensue when they make a case for devoting all their "import" contract budget to getting a superstar in for a few weeks of slap and tickle T20 rather than a few months of four-day cricket in front of nobody.

As an aside, if I was the State sponsorship manager, I sure as hell would have been keen to retain the rights to the TTPKAT (The Tournament Previously Known As The) State Twenty20 because it is likely to be the one generating the most headlines read by the most Kiwis in 2009/10.

As another aside, if the Beige Brigade was in charge The Twenty20 would be held at beach venues too: Whangarei, Taupo, Mt Maunganui, Tauranga, Waikanae, Nelson, New Plymouth and Queenstown would do the trick, and the final would be a best of three over two days at the venue of the top qualifier's choosing.

I think the rules should be relaxed to allow two import players in each team, with NZC allocating some money to hire the second gun. A few weeks in New Zealand in January could be quite appealing to many cricketers around the world. And who should the CEOs be looking at hiring? Well here are the top 20 performers at the recent ICC Twenty20 Championships - a decent place to start for sure...  Note too that the Australian provinces are already on to it - #3 Dwayne Bravo is off to Victoria, #1 Shahid Afridi is in line to join New South Wales and Western Australia have previous ties to swingin' #6 Umar Gul. Let's hope the Kiwi chin-wagging turns to action sometime very soon.

See the Top 100 at Rediff here.

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-> This week's episode of The BYC - the Beige Brigade podcast: In Episode 93 , the "Rheineck Lager Episode", we find out about Arnie's place of abode, The Regular Correspondent is outraged at The Rus, News or Ruse celebrates Father's Day, the NZC contracted 20 is speculated upon, a member of The BYC is labelled the Exchange4Free sellout of the week, and the Woman Slayer drafts in Phil Tufnell  for a criminal Ashes song...listen in to the streaming version just below...nail the RSS feed for your Pod catcher...or visit The BYC page on iTunes.

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