Graeme Smith: India national stars won’t play in CSA T20 league

Despite the strong ties between Cricket SA's (CSA) new T20 league and the Indian Premier League (IPL), Graeme Smith has revealed that contracted Indian stars will not be available for the SA tournament.

The CSA T20 League, which is SA’s third attempt to create a lucrative world-class T20 competition, and soon will have an official name, will have a lot of IPL flavour.

That is because the owners of the six franchises of the new tournament, of which Smith is the commissioner, also own teams in the world’s best T20 competition, the IPL.

Because of that, there was a slim hope that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) might make an exception and allow their national team stars to be part of the competition.

Smith confirmed that stance will be the case even though CSA enjoy a strong relationship with the BCCI.     

“We have a great relationship with the BCCI and they have supported us as we build our league. At the moment contracted Indian players are not released to participate in foreign leagues outside the IPL,” Smith said.

Smith, though, remains confident the T20 League will be exciting and competitive as it has managed to draw the best talent from other parts of the world.

“We want to make it a competitive league, and to have a competitive league you need to have the players.

“We have worked hard to sign some global T20 superstars and coupled with our world-class SA players, I have no doubt we will be able to showcase competitive and entertaining cricket.

“We have a rich player base that we are committed to investing in and nurturing.”

Apart from generating revenue for CSA, Smith believes the tournament will play a huge role in developing new stars and expanding the talent pool for SA.

“One of our main objectives when setting this league up was to ensure the domestic ecosystem benefits.

“We want to make sure the SA cricket pipeline is growing from grassroots, high performance and provincial levels.

“Although we will have international talent, we will be an SA league, we want to celebrate our players and to give the next generation of talent an aspiration to go further by being exposed to the league and the players taking part.”

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