Franchise cricket has broken the internet
If Peter Lalor cannot find franchise cricket, is it really there?
Franchise cricket has broken the internet. The centre can’t hold. Data is hard to obtain. Facts hard to verify. The World Wide Web can’t keep up. Or, truth be told, just can’t be fagged.
Ever heard of the Boca Raton Trailblazers? Yeah, nah, me neither, at least not until this week. Nor had I heard of the Abu Dhabi Champions New York Strikers, but after some research I think they may actually be called the New York Strikers, it looks like an errant capital letter in one story has burdened them with that elongated title in stories lifted subsequently from that one source.
Artificial intelligence has nothing on the machine-learned ability of that army of underpaid hacks ripping and pasting the work of others.
Both the Boca Raton Trailblazers and the New York Strikers are franchises of the ICC approved Max60 Caribbean League, a humble little T10 competition being played out in the - and this is good - Cayman Islands.
The Cayman Islands are a little spot where billionaires hide their ill-gotten gains somewhere between Cuba and Mexico. In cricket terms it may as well be the Bermuda Triangle, but the league’s boss assures us there’s a subcurrent of cricket culture and the locals still “talk about the days when all the big West Indies players used to visit”.
Hey, if New York can host cricket …
The moon’s been full this week and the minds been bubbling with matters other than sleep so I have found myself staring blankly at the television and came across a match a few nights back featuring old mate David Warner.
Of course.
Warner was opening with Beau Webster, the veteran was swishing at flies on a difficult pitch, but Webster went on to compile 80 odd runs. Warner was gone early. Done by a painfully slow pitch plonked in the middle of a ground with grass so patchy you wondered if they’d had to chase goats off it before the toss.
This was fatuously fascinating. This was T10 cricket, Cayman Islands style.
Warner, Webster, Peter Hatzoglou (a friend of the pod before we transitioned), and even Colin De Groundhomme, were all playing for the aforementioned Boca Raton Trailblazers.
I’m sure you know that Boca Raton is a place in Florida - another place billionaires go to avoid tax and reality. There’s a baseball franchise of the same name.
There was hardly anybody at the game.
The cameras contrived a crowd shot of six blokes pushed uncomfortably together on a group of plastic chairs under a shade cloth, but it was obviously staged. They did their best to look excited but frankly they just looked perplexed. And uncomfortable. A half dozen random strangers was, apparently, the best they could do to manufacture some artificial excitement. It harked back to the days when the Big Bash used to pay good looking young people to attend and pretend they were having a good time.
The next morning I went to Cricinfo to check out the competition and remind myself of the details of the game I’d been watching in the middle of the night, but there were not details to be found.
I went to the tab that had all the series being played at the moment and there are a hell of a lot: West Indies vs South Africa, Pakistan vs Bangladesh, England vs Sri Lanka, WCPL 2024, CPL 2024, The Hundred (m), The Hundred (w), Vitality T20 Blast, Aus-W A vs Ind W A, Top End Series, County Division One, County Division Two, Test Championship 2023-25, Women’s Championship, World Cup League …
In what appears to be cricket’s most barren winter for a decade there is so much cricket being played you could adapt the series to the lyrics of I’ve Been Everywhere Man. You will note, however, that while Cricinfo is covering things as obscure as the Top End Series being played up north at the moment, it has no bandwidth for the Max60 Caribbean League.
There’s talk the data is hard to obtain. And while it is an ICC approved event (that’s like the RSPCA stamp of approval on your supermarket chicken) the people at Cricinfo appear to have just run out of bandwidth. It’s a daunting thought. Not even Cricinfo can find space on its Himalayan range of data solos for this crap.
Max60 may resemble a version of Pradeep Mathews, the erased cricket hero at the heart of Sheehan Karunitalaka’s novel, Chinaman, but it exists
Mike Haysman is commentating the games and I’d sent him a message asking if they called it T10 because that was how many people attended.
His reply shall remain unreported.
Haysman is an interesting study in cricket commentary. He pops up in the most random of places. I’d found him in Pakistan in 2022 when the Australians toured there, he had the long distance stare of a long term prisoner. Turned out he’d been there for months doing some local T20 tournament or other and now this, the whole time confined to the hotel and the commentators armoured van.
Haysie’s seen it all. Was Stanton’s point man in the Caribbean before that went belly up. He popped up in New York earlier this year. Gave me a lift back to town in the commentator’s Suburban and we had dinner at an Italian place in Hell’s Kitchen. He is one of the great men, a sense of humour so dry it can evaporate an entire bottle of wine in no time and lives in a house in LA with cats, but he’s not really the point here.
The point is that out there in the multiverse there are endless versions of franchise cricket like this. At any given time there’s an infinite number of Dave Warners and Colin Groundhomme playing matches somewhere for someone.
I texted Warner too and he confirmed it was him and that this is not a moon landing scenario. He was in the Cayman Islands, he is playing games, it is not being acted out on a stage set.
The only reliable reporting source on the tournament - you can be pretty confident no one has sent a journalist along to cover it - is Tristan Lavalette at Forbes. An Australian journalist based in Perth, Tristan is an excellent source on matters ICC and cricket beyond most reporter’s narrow scope.
The Max60 apparently has the backing of the Caribbean nations and hopefully it works for them. At this stage, however, mostly it’s putting money into the pockets of a handful of cricketers like those mentioned above. Adding more swell to Davey’s super.
I’m glad you confirmed with Dave Warner it was real. Could have been cricket’s version of ‘Capricorn One’.
Camus presciently captured the challenge of reporting of on franchise cricket many decades ago
The absurd is born of the encounter between two opposed concepts: the human need for meaning and the apparent meaninglessness of the universe.
GH has made the point more succinctly elsewhere "the IPL is still on".
I admire those journos and commentators who try (or have) to earn a living making copy from this cricketing gruel. Perhaps with the advance of AI, we can deploy these random prose generators to cover the random number generation of franchise cricket whose financial backers remind me of a modern day Maharaja of Porbandar.
Deploying AI, we can unburden our own human suffering trying to find existentialist meaning in this mobius strip cricket, perpetually in motion towards the next tournament, the players supers swelling like team affliations on a cricinfo player profile.
The sun sat on the British Empire, driven as it were by the political imperatives and constraints of empire; its progeny, cricket, does not labour under the same conditions. Only of market conditions and whether the market is sated by another game of cricket. Too much is never enough.