T10 Comes to Australia

Well, Victoria anyway, which is itself interesting

At an International Cricket Council chief executives’ meeting in March 2006, the Board of Control for Cricket in India secretary Niranjan Shah came up with a candidate for the historic cricket remark that has aged most poorly. ‘Twenty20?’ he scoffed, when the subject came up of India’s participation in the following year’s inaugural World Twenty20. ‘Why not ten-ten or five-five or one-one?’

The first shoe dropped when India proceeded to win at the Wanderers, preluding the country’s rapturous embrace of the Indian Premier League; the second shoe, T10, took another decade or so. But there was a goodly turnout, players and crowds, when Niranjan’s reductio ad absurdum became a reality in December 2017 and the first Abu Dhabi T10 was staged. It has remained part of the calendar, the most recent instalment extending to forty ninety-minute matches, with Player of the Series Jos Buttler looking a great deal happier leading the victorious Deccan Gladiators than he did leading England last night.

Bands tending to get to Australia a little later and greyer, it’s not surprising we have had to wait for the variant here, but we’ll get our first senior glimpse at Junction Oval on 7 April when Cricket Victoria roll out a ten-day, five-team tournament that will be streamed into India by the fantasy sports collosus Dream 11. Cricket Victoria, you say? That’s the equally interesting aspect of this development: a local association seeking a piece of the world action. It has an antecedent, in Guyana’s petrodollar-powered T20 Global Super League, to which Victoria, perhaps not coincidentally, sent a team - a quirky combo captained by Corey Anderson. But for Australia, it is certainly a little outre.