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Lorgat: Beware of T20 overkill
14/05/2008 20:02 - (SA)
London - New international cricket chief
Haroon Lorgat said on Wednesday it was important that the
expanding Twenty20 format did not begin to dominate the Test and
50-over game.
South African Lorgat, who will become the International
Cricket Council's (ICC) chief executive in July, said Test
cricket must remain the leading format in the sport.
"I sat in on the ICC cricket committee meeting this month
and they were very clear that Test cricket should remain the
pinnacle of the game and I agree," Lorgat told Reuters in a
telephone interview on Wednesday.
Twenty20, which began in England in 2003, is making rapid
progress as the game's most popular format and since the
inaugural ICC Twenty20 World Cup in September, a slew of
Twenty20 events have surfaced.
The unofficial Indian Cricket League began, the
officially-backed Indian Premier League started last month and
there is talk of England, West Indies and Pakistan expanding
their own domestic Twenty20 competitions to exploit the wave of
international popularity in the event.
"It's a form of the game we can use as a wonderful
opportunity to grow cricket globally, though we will have to
manage the load that Twenty20 takes on against Test and 50-over
cricket," Lorgat said.
Sensible balance
"We are seeing a lot of Twenty20 now because the IPL is
going on but like most things that are new, you see an explosion
of interest at first and then things settle down.
"We might be having too much of it at first but I hope going
forward we can keep a sensible balance between Twenty20 and the
other formats."
Lorgat, 48 this month, is an accountant by profession though
has received an advanced cricketing pedigree with various roles
within South African cricket, including convener of selectors
for the national team between 2004 and 2007 and treasurer of the
cricket board.
He will travel to Dubai next month to try to secure
accommodation in the city that will be his new home for at least
the next three years.
Lorgat joins the ICC at a time when its image has taken
something of a battering following the premature exit of his
predecessor Malcolm Speed, its handling of controversies
surrounding umpires Darrell Hair and Steve Bucknor and criticism
it received after the farcical World Cup final last year.
Former ICC president Ehsan Mani told Reuters last month that
the ICC "needs to pull its act together" or lose credibility.
"I would always prefer to see the game itself receive the
maximum exposure in the news rather than the off the field
issues that we have read about," Lorgat said. "They are not the
kind of stories you want reported about the ICC.
"But with me soon to start and with David Morgan beginning
his term as president at the same time, I hope we will be given
the opportunity to project the game itself into the newspapers
and improve the current image."
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