LONDON: The Saudi Arabia Cricket Board is in advanced talks with Pakistan superstars Shahid Afridi and Inzamam Ul-Haq about the inaugural T10 cricket tournament scheduled to be held in the Kingdom later this year.
News filtered out in February that Saudi Arabia was looking to host a showpiece event of the shortest version of the game, but the head of cricket in the Kingdom has confirmed to Arab News that things have progressed so rapidly that not only is the tournament — which will carry a prize of $300,00 for the winner — is slated for December, but that crowd-pulling players and owners have already been earmarked to be involved in the proposed eight-team jamboree.
“It will be a big-money tournament,” Nadeem Nadwi, the CEO of Saudi Cricket, told Arab News.
“We would like it to be high profile and make it more attractive for the players with the prize money. We are working on the possibility of making it $300,000 for the winners and $150,000 for the runners-up.”
Pakistan crowd favorite Afridi, known as “Boom Boom,” is already being lined to play in the round-robin tournament, which will be held over a maximum of six days at the Ministry of Education Stadium in Jeddah, while the hope is to get the Punjabi Legends, the team co-owned by Inzamam, to take part.
“Afridi is a crowd-puller and we’d like to have these players playing,” Nadwi said. “We are talking to Inzamam and Shahid. It is difficult to get Indian players as they have a defined policy where they only play in the Indian Premier League. It will be mainly players from the sub-continent, but we are (also) expecting players from the UK, West Indies and South Africa.”
Six teams played in the first-ever T10 event in Sharjah in December, but the Saudi Cricket Board are seeking to go bigger and better.
“We want eight teams or a minimum of six franchises,” said Nadwi. “There would be two from Pakistan, two from India, one from Sri Lanka, one from Bangladesh, one from UAE and one from Saudi Arabia. We’re thinking of three matches a day between five to six days. We think it’s going to be a huge success.”
The Saudi Cricket Board is still awaiting official sanctioning from the International Cricket Council, but they do not anticipate that being a problem and expect to be given the green light in August. The plan is to make the tournament a regular part of the short-format circuit and stage it every year for at least the next five years.
Nadwi’s vision is such that he is clear on how he sees each team being made up and is keen for them not to just be packed with star names.
“We’d like Associate nation players to be part of the team,” he said. “We’d also like to include an U-19 player in each team and also have two Saudi players in each team. That’s going to be important to help the locals understand it and make it more attractive. We have 16-18 Saudi players shortlisted.”
Nadwi is confident the Saudi players can hold their own among such star names and established players.
“We have got some very good talent,” he said. “Other Gulf states are very dependent on their expat community but the focus here in Saudi is to take the game to the locals. We don’t want to rely on expat talent. We have good talent coming through. We had two Saudi nationals playing in the recent Asian Qualifier in Kuwait, where bar us, Bahrain, Kuwait and the Maldives, no other team had that number of locals in their team.”
Nadwi said the decision to add the cricket tournament to the Kingdom’s portfolio of sporting events is multi-layered.
“It’s the second most popular game after football, and as a T10 game lasts about the same as a football game we think the locals will be attracted to it,” he said. “This also shows the seriousness of the government to promote the game of cricket here. The UAE has staged many tournaments, but their population is very small and the stadiums are empty. We have 32 million people here and the stadium will be full with 14-15,000 fans. As part of the Kingdom 2030 Vision we also want to play at at least three World Cups before then, either ODI or T20. That is the dream and I believe it is realistic and I’m confident we will do that.”