Lisa shows ‘struggling’ BPL the way forward

Lisa Sthalekar, former Australian women’s cricketer and current president of the World Cricketers’ Association (WCA), said on Sunday that Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), the country’s lone franchise-based T20 tournament, needs to improve its overall performance to attract foreign cricketers. 

In the recent past, WCA came up with an assessment based on metrics developed in conjunction with, and considered important to, players, agents and players’ associations.

These are based on key benchmarks in cricket and across other sports, while major domestic leagues are defined as those featuring five or more current Full Member international cricketers as overseas players.

According to their assessment comprising 10 T20 tournaments, The Hundred is leading with 75.2 points, while the BPL is at the bottom of the list with 22.6.

Indian Premier League is third with 62.6 points behind SAT20, which earned 68.0 points.

The WCA president urged the newly-formed Cricketers’ Welfare Association of Bangladesh (CWAB) and its members to work together with Bangladesh Cricket Board and ensure that the tournament, largely criticised for non-payment and fixing issues, should start afresh and allow foreign cricketers to feature in it.

“What the World Cricketers' Association does, and we have it on our website, is almost a traffic light system of all of the T20 leagues around there. It's to help players, administrators, and agents to understand what have been the issues or what have been the successful things from each T20 league,” Lisa told reporters at Mirpur.

“Obviously, if you look at BPL, their traffic light doesn't have a lot of green, unfortunately. And I think speaking to Mithun (Mohammad Mithin, president of CWAB), I said this is an opportunity for them as a new organisation, a new executive, to be able to work with Bangladesh Cricket Board to ensure that overseas players want to come here and play, and that potentially they can get into that amber, green lights,” she said.

“And for it to be a tournament that people want to travel and be part of because you've got some wonderful facilities, you've got some wonderful cricketers, obviously that's shown how Bangladesh have been able to perform in recent times. So hopefully, between the two organisations, they can work together and ensure that BPL is as strong and prosperous as it can be,” she added.