During their annual general meeting, Cricket South Africa (CSA) announced that they will be launching a new T20 league later this year as the CSA members council voted unanimously in favor of it. The tournament is expected to replace a T20 league that was to be launched originally last year and will include six teams in a 30-match league phase. It will be played from November 9 to December 16 and will be concluded with an eliminator match and a final.
However, surprisingly the top Proteas cricketers will not be able to take part in the tournament for at least the first 10 days, with the ODI squad touring Australia from October 31 to November 17. Apart from this, further details of the tournament are yet to be revealed as the sponsors and broadcasters don’t seem to be finalized as of now.
Pay television channel SuperSport is expected to broadcast the games, despite pulling out of a 49% shareholding in a T20 league. There has been no mention of private ownership at this stage, with CSA bearing the costs of the tournament alone.
ALSO READ: CSA shows their interest to organize IPL 2019
However, the CSA has been slammed with lawsuits from by four of the eight original owners of the GLT20 tournament who had reserved their rights to teams, if the new tournament gets streamlined. On the other hand, CSA seems to have unaffected by this development and maintained that it has always acted in a way which it thought was best for the game, postponing the original tournament and changing the ownership model from being foreign-based to local-based to eventually in-house.
Describing the same, CSA President Chris Nenzani said, “Chief Executive Thabang Moroe and his management team have come with a commercial model that is both financially viable and offers promise for an exciting and long-term future that meets all the conditions laid down by the CSA Board of Directors. We will never administer cricket in a manner that is not in line with good corporate governance. That is a sustainability issue. As the leader, we were comfortable that we had to postpone the T20 League in order to sustain the game in this country, which is our key mandate.”
At the AGM, CSA also revealed their recent financial figures as their revenue for the last financial year standing at USD 98.44 million and a profit of USD 22.97 million. The figures suggest that the cricketing board is ready to organize the league at least on the financial grounds.
