CHENNAI: Ranging from cricket over-kill and audience fatigue to dull pitches and marquee players either injured or abstaining, the third installment of the Champions League has presented a mixed bag. Definitely, India’s abysmal show in England has had its implications. To worsen the scenario, star players — Sachin Tendulkar, Zaheer Khan, Rohit Sharma, Munaf Patel — opted out of the event due to injury or weariness, and others like MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina and Murali Vijay underperformed.
But there was enough competitiveness to propel the tournament and it has been the most intensely fought of the three editions of the Champions League. This wasn’t a one-dimensional T20 tournament in that there was space for every purveyor of the game.
Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Lasith Malinga and Shaun Tait testified the worth of out-and-out pacers even on dead sub-continent tracks, whereas Jacques Kallis, Gautam Gambhir, Mike Hussey, Callum Ferguson and Virat Kohli reinforced that prospering in T20 doesn’t necessarily require muscle.
The big-hitters too were a hit as when New South Wales Blues’ David Warner’s subjugated Chennai Super Kings and Chris Gayle did the same to the Aussie southpaw’s team. Trinidad’s Sunil Narine lend an aura of mystery with his knuckle ball. However, no unknown entity did enough to warrant notice, like Kieron Pollard in 2009.
Scrappiness, with a positive tone, defined the tournament. Till the end of the group stage, as many as 11 of the 26 matches had been decided in the last over including a game that went to the Super Over. All teams endured at least a loss, and only qualifiers Auckland and Leicestershire returned with without winning a match.
With rain-factored intrigue in certain cases, most teams went into their final group matches with hopes of semifinal qualification.
Whether the insatiable cricket audience had enough appetite to consume another feast was widely debated, and it seemed the fatigue exhibited by the Indian players in England had crept into the loyalists too. Hence, stadiums were mostly empty, and even for the hosts’ matches there was gaping bareness. Generally, the event failed to the capture public imagination. Hence, marketing-wise, the tournament wasn’t as much a success as its predecessors or the IPL, but competition-wise there was so much this tournament can savour.
Primarily, the tournament drove home two pertinent points — firstly, too much of T20 cricket can hamper its own popularity, and secondly, that it can accommodate a wider ranges of skills.