Champions League T20

First topic message reminder :

Yorkshire beats the stronger on paper Uva Next club from Lanka.
and not surprisingly.....a south african David Miller sees them throuhg......with an unlikely good not out score from Adil Rashid..who had a good game.

and a strong Aukland side beats a strong Sialkot club side.

Condtions ...the moment pitches are outside the subcontinent.....the Kiwi and English sides are getting the better of the super strong looking Pakistan and Lankan sides

is the final today or tomoroow?

3:30pm Sunday your time

Pink shirted sydney team has the Lions on the mat opening with spinnera dn have them 15-4

O keefe actually turned one enough to have a RHB caught at slips with the new ball

The Pinkies are doing well again.

Restricted the Lions to 121 all out. At least 30-40 runs short of a defendable total; maybe more against the Sixers.

Symes with Nos. 7 and 8 see Lions to a 121........something on the board to fight with on a pitch that defnitely has bounce.......taking quite a few of surprisingly of 2 of world's fastest bowlers.....Starc and Pat cummins.

Still It's Sydney's game to lose from here.

Well I've just watched some CL cricket live for the first time this year. Frankly PNG vs Bermuda was a more interesting match with better commentary (do these guys get paid by number of inane comments?)...

Starc with a rare off-day. Hazzlewood looks like another fine young bowler, how have Australia gone from looking like a side who couldn't bowl out a team of Boycott's mums armed with sticks of rhubarb to now having youngsters like Pattinson, Cummins, Starc, Hazzlewood? Not that Siddle is exactly old either... Testament to their accademy system I guess...

Lions finish on 121. Decent recovery, but you'd have to fancy Sydney strongly.

Slept in after my alarm went off. Only saw the last 5 or 6 overs.

Starc and Cummins did go for a few but not as bad as the last match with Wiese smashing them around.

Agree Mike, most games have been a task to watch; except for the last semi and hopefully this one.

The fielding from the Sixers has been mostly outstanding. A few shockers but some very, very good catches and they're hitting the stumps regularly with some spectacular run outs.

All those years of practising in my back yard are paying off...

First look at Phangiso... decent flight, nice action, but eco rate of 4.5? Nah, I don't by that...

Ah, a switch to someone wearing silly glasses standing by a cup. Anything to distract from the cricket. Actually in this case that's not quite such a bad thing.

Nannes has bowled well mind. Lumb has struggled a bit with his timing but stuck at it.

This is a 150 pitch to be fair.

Lions drop Lumb's sitter down the throat of long off....in and out...and then Haddin is dropped at long leg next over

and is the straw that broke the camel's back.

Until this point the Lion's bowlers had kept it tight....but it's game over at this point.

The "Choke" Endemic runs deeper in SA than merely their national side

Of course as I typed that, Nannes had to go away and give 17 runs in his over. Althought to be fair, 4 of those from an edge and 6 through deep square-leg's hands.

nice shot from Haddin at the end of the over though.

Ah, a good piece of commentary from Gavaskar. Points out that even in T20 you can afford to take a couple of overs to play yourself in (Sydney run rate now up to 8 an over). Also, an excellent technical analysis on Lumb's straight 6.

100 up.

Michael Lumb wins the Golden Bat. (whoopie!... but he has batted well throughout. Thank you Yorkshire)

First NSW and now the inner eastern suburbs of Sydney are the winners of the CLT20. Magenta rules!

Wow.
I wouldn't say the Lions 'choked' KP_F. They simply ran into a red (or pink?) hot Sydney side.
To remain undefeated is a great achievement even though there were a couple of close ones and patches of poor play.

Well, that was very one-sided. Fittingly perhaps because (based purely on the scores) it does seem that Sydney have been the dominant side at this tournament. They've built their success mainly on their bowling, and sensible batting.

I guess people will bring up the choker's tag against Lions. Not sure that's fair, today it was simply a case of the better side playing better cricket in all departments.

Apart from that, for a global final the standard of cricket was awful. As I said earlier in this thread, this is part of the reason why tournaments like this in cricket won't take over from internationals, unlike in other sports.

Looking forward to watching some better cricket shortly...

Champions League will in 5 years time evolve to be the premier T20 torunament....at par with the world cup ( whihc I suspect might beocme a every 4 year event)

for the simple reason that competitive T20 is club cricket in it's most prominent form....and money associated with it is tremendous.

look at the money clubs have made.
Prize money: The winner will get US $2.5 million, the runner-up US $1.3 million, with the two beaten semi-finalists earning US $500,000

I'm not so sure. For me, there are two reasons why the Champions League format won't work in cricket as it has in football:
1) fan base: viewing figures are already down. Aside from a few Indians, can anyone really say they support a side in this more than they do the national side? Contrast to football (or even rugby union) where many Man Utd/Chelsea/Barca/Madrid fans are fans of their club first and their country second.
2) Standards: the football CL (and Rugby HK) are arguably the premium events in their sport in terms of standard, and have been for a while now. Based purely on the final, this is certainly not the case in cricket.

Until either or both of these aspects are adressed, the CL will IMO to fail to take off. Of course 1) and 2) may be linked. I would also hope they are linked to the fact that the CLT20 as yet barely qualifies as a "sport" competition (it is more like a business venture) but doubt it.

congrats to the sixers, however it was a unbelivabvly one sided final!

This is my side of the CLT20

1.Michael Lumb (sixers)
2.Gulam Bodi (Lions)
3.Quinton Du Kock (lions)
4.Faf du Plessis (chennai)
5.Neil McKenzie (lions)
6.Moises Henriques (sixers)
7.M.S.Dhoni (wk) (chennai) (C)
8.Mitchell Starc (sixsrs)
9.Josh Hazlewood (sixers)
10.Aaran Phangiso (lions)
11.Doug Bollinger (chennai)

CF wrote:congrats to the sixers, however it was a unbelivabvly one sided final!

Cheers CF.
Yes, it was a rather one-sided final. I wasn't expecting it to be a 10 wicket win.