More schedule challenges ahead for SA20, says Graeme Smith

The SA20’s reliance on SA’s best cricket talent allows the competition to maintain a stronger sense of legitimacy even as the proliferation of T20 Leagues can lead to the integrity of many of those competitions being compromised.

Graeme Smith, the SA20’s commissioner, said the tournament had carved a footprint for itself, which allowed it to absorb much of the comings and goings of players, which have become a feature of modern cricket, where players can end up participating in two or even three different leagues in less than a month.

“It is very difficult. We are a majority-based SA league, the investment is back into SA cricket. The improvement in the league this year was seeing the standard of the SA players really grow,” said Smith.

The coming and going of international players in the tournament, does make a mockery of the league in some eyes. Nicholas Pooran, the left-hander from the West Indies played in just three league matches for the Durban Super Giants, before heading to the International League T20 in Dubai. He was replaced by Australian Marcus Stoinis who played in five games and then went back to Australia for an international series.

Stoinis’ countryman Ashton Agar arrived in Durban as a replacement for Noor Ahmad who was called up by Afghanistan, for the week of the playoffs.

But that is a problem faced by most T20 Leagues, with the exception of the IPL, which is the only franchise tournament granted its own window by the ICC.

Smith’s careful balancing act in seeking to outline the SA20’s integrity, despite the movement of international players, is understandable, given that all the teams in the SA tournament are owned by Indian companies which also own teams in the IPL.

“I look at it differently and in a more positive light,” said Smith. “We are blessed to be able to attract the top international talent. Those guys want to be here. I remember having conversations when we were building SA20, and there was no confidence in SA cricket that we would be able to pull it off at this level.”

That scepticism was the result of Cricket SA’s two failed attempts at creating a league previously, including the Global League T20, which actually had a player auction, but subsequently failed to get off the ground because of the absence of a financially workable broadcast deal.

The SA20 doesn’t have that concern thanks to its partnership with India broadcaster Network 18 and local satellite company SuperSport, which is a shareholder in SA20.

“If we look at what we created in two years, it’s amazing. We have gone from a place where international talent hasn’t backed our league to a point where they want to be a part of it. And now our SA crop of players has in two years really developed.”