JEDDAH – The Saudi Arabia Cricket Board is negotiating with start cricketers Shahid Afridi and Inzamam Ul-Haq about the inaugural T10 cricket tournament scheduled to be held in the Kingdom later this year.
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, reports Arab News on Friday.
“It will be a big-money tournament,” Nadeem Nadwi, the CEO of Saudi Cricket, told the newspaper.
“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.
“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 main players from the sub-continent, but we are (also) expecting players from the UK, West Indies and South Africa.”
“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.
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.
“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.
