'I hate what this is doing to our game'... deep divisions in Irish cricket as six times aborted T20 tournament finally gets off the ground and people question who really benefits besides a handful of washed-up stars

Thursday morning sees a T20 fixture which has many Irish cricket followers licking their lips.

A tasty encounter between sides called the Dublin Guardians and the Belfast Wolves will give bragging rights to those in Leinster and the Northern union who believe they have the better players.

Except it is not that simple: there’s only six Irish players on each side, and in Belfast half of that contingent is from Dublin, while two of the Guardians play for clubs up north.

The Dublin side also includes players from Scotland, USA, Greece, UAE, New Zealand, India and England. The four players from the other Test playing nations are all aged 35 or over.

Welcome to the meaningless world of franchise cricket.

Still, it will be a great spectacle, what time is the next Dart?

Eh, the Dart won’t take you to the airport, and you’d better rush because the game starts at 10.30am in Voorburg, a suburb of the Hague in the Netherlands.

Oh dear, but I suppose it’s on TV?

Yes, but only if you’re a subscriber to TNT Sports.

The game is part of the inaugural season of the European T20 Premier League, and if you’re thinking ‘inaugural? – I’ve heard that before’, you wouldn’t be wrong.

The Euro T20 Slam was first launched in 2019 with great fanfare, heralding a new era in the sport in Ireland, Scotland and Netherlands, promising top class cricket and megastars aplenty. The brainchild of Indian media businessmen who recruited the governing bodies of the game in Ireland, Scotland and Netherlands, it was cancelled two weeks before it was due to begin.

Eoin Morgan, Rashid Khan and Dale Steyn were among the A-listers who had signed up.

The lack of cricketing and broadcast infrastructure at the proposed venues was the public excuse, although the organisers had run into financial troubles with a league in Canada earlier that year.

Every year since the Slam, or its successor the ETPL, has been launched and aborted with depressing regularity. First Covid happened, then it struggled to find investors, then the original organisers departed, suing Cricket Ireland unsuccessfully. And all the while the infrastructure problems were still present.

Two years ago a Bollywood star, Abishek Bachchan, became co-owner with lots of talk of big name investors, although he still couldn’t get enough of them involved to see even a single ball bowled.

It was becoming a joke, and a serious one too as the participating unions had restructured their summers to facilitate the ETPL and Ireland’s players and supporters were eventually left kicking their heels for large chunks of their short home seasons.

Last October Warren Deutrom resigned after 19 years as CEO of Cricket Ireland, and soon fetched up as a director of the ETPL, and chairman of Rules X, its parent company and co-owner.

Coincidence or not, the experienced Deutrom has seen the ETPL through to the stage where it kicks off this afternoon with the first of 30 matches between the six sides (see panel), the first 17 of which will be played at Sportpark Westvliet. The teams move lock, stock and barrel to Dublin, with the opening game on September 9 between the two Irish sides.

After match 30, the second and third-placed sides play off in a qualifier to meet the league leaders in the final on Sunday September 20 in Malahide.

The tournament has been built for Indian consumption, with games starting at 10.30am and 2.15pm Irish time, which won’t pack in the crowds with the mostly youthful T20 audience back at school.

The sprinkling of stardust, with the likes of Steve Smith, Faf du Plessis and Glenn Maxwell, will attract some followers, and recruiting India legend Ravi Ashwin for the Dublin Guardians will certainly boost the Malahide gate.

The Irish players, on fees estimated from €40,000 to €120,000 for a month’s work, have been following their employers’ script, making all the right noises about how the game here will benefit.

But the question that is asked most around the boundary by supporters is cui bono: who here will actually gain from this league, besides that handful of players?

Cash-strapped Cricket Ireland will receive an approximate €1m facilitation fee which has already been budgeted for. Its 20% ownership of the ETPL will mean little as no-one expects it to make a profit this year.

The provincial unions have been recruited as ‘community partners’ to the franchise teams, but there will be no financial benefit to them besides some soft support with coaching and youth.

Paul Stirling talked to Ally McCalmont on the excellent Irish Cricket Podcast last week, and sees a long term benefit for his union.

‘It’s important to win the tournament but to get other things right too, like to give it a family feel,’ said Stirling. ‘That’s just as important as winning in the first one. If you create that environment people will come back.’

Besides players, the ETPL also sees opportunity for Irish coaches Ed Joyce, John Mooney and Kevin O’Brien.

The hero of the win over England in 2011 has had some success with Italy, who he helped bring to the T20 World Cup in January — leading to the quip that the Azzurri cricketers have won as many World Cup matches since 2006 as their footballers.

‘Kevvy is a fierce competitor,’ says Stirling, ‘it will be all about clearing the ropes. Look at the overseas players we’ve signed — there won’t be too much nudging for ones and twos for sure.’

I don’t have any insight into the layout of Stirling’s wardrobe, but should he have kept a shirt of every team he’s played for, it would likely leave little room for anything else.

In T20 matches alone, the Ireland batsman has turned out for Middlesex, Sylhet Royals, Kandahar Kings, Khulna Titans, Northern Knights, Northamptonshire, Dambulla Viiking, Islamabad United, Southern Brave, Warwickshire, Guyana Amazon Warriors, Paarl Royals, Oval Invincibles, Leicestershire, Sylhet Strikers, Chitwan Tigers and Abu Dhabi Knight Riders.

He’ll soon have to find room for the fetching black shirt of the Belfast Wolves.

And that’s one of the complaints followers have about T20: the lack of consistency — or what some call loyalty — to their teams. For example, Eoin Morgan had eight seasons at the Indian Premier League, turning out for four different teams.

The short version of the game arrived with a bang barely 20 years ago, but soon became the most popular format with television companies. With their money driving the game, especially in India, new audiences were brought in and the IPL has since become the second most lucrative sporting league in the world after the American NFL. The last media rights deal saw each IPL game valued at $13.5m.

While many players have made fortunes from T20, it has seen others badly burned by leagues that collapsed without paying the stars. ICC’s capitulation to India and its TV money saw leagues spring up worldwide overnight without regulation and the governing body has struggled to put the genie back in the bottle.

Corruption almost killed international cricket in the 1990s, and ICC has tried to be vigilant ever since, especially with the Wild West nature of much of the franchise scene. Life bans have been handed out over match fixing and this year’s Bangladesh Premier League cancelled.

‘This tournament should be staged ‌in a way that the BCB can be proud of,’ said CEO Tamim Iqbal. Are we proud of what has happened over the last few years? Perhaps not.’

A player and multiple BPL team officials were suspended in May after an anti-corruption probe.

The breakneck speed of T20, which favours aggressive batting, has been blamed for damaging player techniques too.

Test cricket is currently in crisis in Australia where three of the last seven five-day games staged there were completed in two days, with reckless batting ruining the format that used to be about ebb and flow.

Unless it’s an India visit, T20 hasn’t quite caught on here either, where Irish supporters prefer the 50-over format, which has seen most of Ireland’s greatest days.

Many, too, including most of the players, profess their love for Test matches. In England and Australia, crowds and TV audiences for the Hundred and Big Bash have slumped this year.

But spare a thought for Ireland Test captain Andrew Balbirnie, who has been on the various Euro Slam and ETPL rosters for the previous six aborted tournaments. This year, despite being the only batsman to score a century in the T20 interprovincials, he wasn’t one of the 17 Irish players to get a contract.

One recent Irish international told me: ‘I really don’t like T20. I hate what it’s done to cricket and the way it’s played, and what it’s done to the way the game is organised worldwide.’

Over the next few weeks we’ll see whether the Dublin Guardians and Belfast Wolves can persuade enough Irish supporters to give it a whirl.