By Amlan Chakraborty
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – A franchise-based cricket tournament gets underway in Zimbabwe next week continuing an ambitious expansion of the sport’s 10-overs format, with its promoter asserting that the 90-minute game could one day rival the popularity of soccer.
T20 cricket has emerged as the game’s most popular format spawning mushrooming leagues around the world, while 50-overs cricket faces an uncertain fate, especially after the Marylebone Cricket Club questioned its relevance outside the ODI World Cup.
The shorter forms of the game include The Hundred, a 100-ball competition launched by the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2021, which is struggling to gain a foothold in the game’s increasingly crowded landscape.
Shaji Ul Mulk, chairman of T Ten Global Sports, which is pushing the T10 format’s expansion, said cricket must pack its drama and action into 90 minutes if it is to rival the popularity of soccer.
While a 20-overs match takes about three hours, an ODI lasts nearly eight while most tests are played over five days.
“We thought, ‘Why can’t cricket be played in 90 minutes?’ and in 90 minutes you can only do 10 overs,” Mulk, the Dubai-based head of a business conglomerate, told Reuters.
“That’s how T10 came into play.”
His company has partnered with Zimbabwe Cricket to launch the Zim Afro T10, which begins next Thursday in Harare and features, among others, England’s World Cup-winning captain Eoin Morgan.
Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt owns one of the five franchises in the competition.
Mulk’s company has also teamed up with Sri Lanka Cricket to stage a T10 tournament there in December.
Cricket West Indies became the first ICC full member to host a 10-overs tournament last year, although T Ten Global Sports was not involved.
OLYMPIC INCLUSION
Mulk’s company got the ball rolling in 2017 when it held a four-day T10 tournament in Sharjah. The event was later moved to Abu Dhabi where it will be held for a sixth time in November.
The Abu Dhabi tournament got a major boost when the game’s global governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), sanctioned the event.
“We built the property for six years and the success encouraged us to go global,” Mulk said.
“For us, the intention was to have the format accepted by the full members. The UAE is a very powerful board, but it’s still an associate board. We wanted the full members to play.”
Mulk’s company is also testing the waters in India and the United States with Masters T10 leagues, which will be played in August and February next year respectively.
Former India all-rounder Yuvraj Singh, Pakistan ex-captain Shahid Afridi and former Australia captain Aaron Finch are among the retired players who have confirmed their participation in the U.S. event.
The brevity of T10 also makes it better suited to multi-sports events like the Olympics than T20, which has been played at the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games, Mulk said.
England’s Morgan, former India opener Virender Sehwag and Afridi have also backed T10 as the preferred format for the Olympics should cricket ever become part of it.
“The Olympics is all about participation of the maximum number of nations,” Mulk said. “So when you want the entire world to play, it needs to be a 90-minute game, it can’t be more than that practically.”
His company has also inked a deal with the Africa Cricket Association (ACA) to launch a pan-continental T10 tournament next year.
“We are really excited about it. This will be a huge 32-country event,” he added.
(Reporting by Amlan Chakraborty in New Delhi; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
