ECB May Not Send Teams for Champions League Twenty20 2011 over Payment Standoff

The England and Wales Cricket Board may set a precedence of sorts by not sending their England cricket county teams for the Champions League Twenty20 2011, the second time they will do so in history if they follow through over payment concerns.

Champions League Twenty20

The ECB refused England county teams to compete in the Champions League Twenty20 2010 over scheduling dispute that did not see the ECB making adjustments to decide the Twenty20 cup winners prior to the commencement of the 2010 edition.

In the 2011 edition of the Champions League Twenty20, the two teams from the England county cricket must go through the Champions League Twenty20 2011 qualifier before they can contemplate competing in the main draw. For that the teams will need to be in Hyderabad by the 19th of September, which is exactly a month from now.

The ECB are yet to carry through on this schedule to decide between the two semi finals of the Friends life T20 semi-finals; Lancashire v Leicestershire, and Hampshire v Somerset.

But it is not the schedule that is the problem on this occasion. In fact, several foreign teams have been complaining about either receiving their payment due from the previous editions of the Champions League Twenty20 or not receiving anything at all by way of a delay.

This time the ECB is setting a new agenda. The ECB and the respective counties are interested in being paid upfront for their participation rather than having to wait on the organizers thereafter it disperse the respective amounts. Their insecurity stems from previous experiences when the England and Wales Cricket Board did send forth teams but the payments were far from prompt.

However, similar complaints were aired by the teams from Australia as well as New Zealand although the two teams from Australia have the opportunity for direct entry into the main draw of the tournament that see three IPL teams and two from South Africa from their domestic Twenty20 competition. England though will have to go through the qualifier first which means that England will have to first qualify from the three day tournament before joining the other seven teams that are already predetermined.

In the past the ECB has rarely seen eye to eye with the tournament. Had the inaugural Champions League Twenty20 not been cancelled in 2008, only one England county team – Middlesex – could have competed because Kent fielded two players – South Africa’s Justin Kemp and Pakistan’s Azhar Mahmood – who were then affiliated with the Indian Cricket League ( ICL ) – then treated as a rebel Twenty20 league and which the BCCI failed to acknowledge. With the ban on Kent from participating that ECB did not approve of, it was yet another intermittent factor in the disputes involving the Champions League Twenty20.

While the CLT20 organizers refused to budge from their stance on that occasion and the CLT20 2010 went through without the participation of the teams from England, the participation of the England county cricket teams in the Champions League Twenty 2011 has once again been thrown into jeopardy.