Blue-bagging

The NSW Blues have had a pretty terrible season so far in the traditional and slightly older forms of the game, but now they seem to be making all the headlines by qualifying for the T20 Champions League and signing up McCullum from the Kiwis for the final. Symonds says it's unAustralian. It's usually hard to take anything on a Roy and HG show at all seriously, but the interview as a whole presents Symonds as too mad even for that setting.

What in the world is he talking about? This whole situation of leagues like the IPL and ICL poses problems, or at least new questions, that were obvious but haven't really been answered yet. The fact that they're Indian, whether they're official or not, or whether the BCCI or any other ICC member is involved isn't the point. The issue is that they are radically changing how cricket is organised. This is especially true in places, like Australia, where state teams have always be representative teams for the state associations, unlike, say county teams in England.

It is a bit strange to combine this setup with participation in something like the Champions League, even stranger when you consider how many of the CL qualifying tournaments a single player could play in. I'm not convinced of the merits of the situation, but NSW are obviously just responding to it as they see best. If they are going to play against teams with players auctioned from all over the world (including some NSWelshmen), why shouldn't they look to draft in some players of their own? If their competition in the form of IPL teams (and even county teams) is happy to take players for short release periods, why shouldn't they? And does Symonds really expect us to believe that he wouldn't play for the Chargers iif Cricket Australia only released him for a single game?

As for McCullum, NSW won the final quite dramatically without too much input from him. But T20 seems more about the hype than the cricket, so maybe noone cares about the result.