ANTIGUA: West Indies’ premier T20 competition, the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) is exploring the prospect of launching the women’s standalone edition of the competition in the near future, American daily Newsday reports.
The issue has made cricketing headlines following West Indies’ exit from the semi-finals of the recently concluded ICC Women’s World T20 on home soil. It is believed that had the former defending champions played more matches in the calendar year and gained more exposure as well as practice, the team’s performance would have been better.
The world tournament was the first standalone one for women in the shortest format of the game, garnering impressive in-stadia audiences in Antigua, Guyana and St.Lucia.
CPL CEO Pete Russell believes that there is an opportunity for the formation of the T20 league to give West Indies’ women’s cricket a further push.
“We need people in the CPL or corporate sponsors to back us and give us that push. We can’t do it all by ourselves. We need more. We need a mini-CPL,” Russell was quoted as saying to Newsday.
“We have already discussed the feasibility of a women’s tournament with CWI or a women’s exhibition match, after the 2017 tournament, and have been discussing how we can make it work since then.”
“Any cricket tournament is a huge logistical challenge to arrange and there are a lot of questions that would need to be answered before we could commit to going ahead. But it is something that we are keen to have as part of the CPL programme, it is not question of ‘if’ it is a question of ‘when’.”
At present, the CPL has the hosting rights for just the men’s competition and will have to have acquire a separate license for the women’s edition from the Cricket West Indies (CWI). Russell opines that CPL and the CWI do not considering investing in such a competition as a risk despite the challenges to launch it. The success of the Rebel Women’s Big Bash League in Australia is an inspiration.
“We don’t see it as a risk, but we have shown over the last six years that we are willing to invest in cricket across the region. It is very early days in these discussions and we have a lot of hoops to jump through before this becomes a reality, but we have seen over the last few weeks just how fast the women’s game is growing and we would love to be a part of its ongoing success.” Russell concluded.
