There is much being written in the cricket news about the APL and the fact that it is sending out feelers and has recruited players from Pakistan and New Zealand. The ICC has obviously got their dander up with one more ‘unauthorised’ cricket league looming on the horizon. So the ICC wants to stop it in its tracks by telling the USCA to set up a viable alternative to it.

The Principal advisor to the ICC, I S Bindra has indicated that this is something that should be nipped in the bud. "I feel that regulation is not the only way to curb unapproved ventures. You need to have a successful alternative, too, like how the BCCI developed its Premier League as a viable model (to the ICL)," Bindra said. 

ICC has advised officials of the USCA to install an IPL model to capitalise on the Twenty20 boom and generate funds for the game's grassroots development in the USA. "What we are looking at is a top class event that will be fully backed by the ICC and will have some top international players. As we see it, many international players, except those from England, are usually free from May to September. This space could be utilized," said Bindra.

Now as if it wasn’t enough that the Americans want in on international cricket, we also have cricket news from China! The Chinese have now made the ambitious assertion that they will become a full fledged test playing nation by the year 2020. To this effect a heavy development plan has been announced. By getting to be a test playing nation, the team would be entitled to participate in test matches played opposite the elite test playing nations.

And it isn’t as if there cricket is a completely new sport for the Chinese. Cricket and China go back a long way, when parts of China that were colonised used to dabble in cricket. In fact there was a Shanghai cricket club back in 1863 and regular matches were played with Hong Kong until it was discontinued when the communists took over the country.

Interest in cricket was now renewed when China joined the ICC in 2004 and the government started to take an interest in the sport. A system has been put in place wherein many regions and schools in China have been roped into play cricket. This is all very well but, qualifying for the Cricket World Cup in 2019? That may be a tad ambitious even for the mighty Asian dragon!

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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