Vin­ode Mam­chan

Fran­chis­es car­ry­ing names of cer­tain coun­tries or cities is noth­ing new and is well ac­cept­ed across the sport­ing world.This is the view of a top of­fi­cial of the Caribbean Pre­mier League. Ac­cord­ing to the of­fi­cial: "It is sur­pris­ing to hear an out­cry in some quar­ters against the fran­chise-based con­cept as pushed by the CPL when it is clear this is the grow­ing trend and ac­cept­ed mod­el in glob­al pro­fes­sion­al sports. The ar­gu­ment that has been put for­ward is that a fran­chise should not car­ry the name of a coun­try if the play­ers com­pris­ing that 15-mem­ber fran­chise are not na­tion­als of that coun­try. This, in­deed, is baf­fling."In re­cent times, the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB) has made their feel­ings known on the fact that the lo­cal fran­chise will be called the T&T Red Steel. They sent out a press re­lease stat­ing that they sup­port­ed the call of T&T Red Steel play­er Samuel Badree that the fran­chis­es should not car­ry the names of the re­spec­tive coun­tries in the Caribbean.

The of­fi­cial in re­spond­ing to this con­tin­ued: "In the In­di­an Pre­mier League, West In­dies bats­man Chris Gayle rep­re­sents Roy­al Chal­lengers Ban­ga­lore, a fran­chise which is based in the city of Ban­ga­lore. This is a fran­chise which al­so has on its ros­ter Sri Lankan Tillakaratne Dil­shan, South African AB de Vil­liers and Aus­tralian Daniel Chris­t­ian."Fur­ther­more, sev­er­al of the In­di­an stars on the Roy­al Chal­lengers side do not hail from Ban­ga­lore. For in­stance, lead­ing bats­man Vi­rat Kohli was born in Del­hi and rep­re­sents Del­hi in the first-class com­pe­ti­tion. The same goes for glob­al sports. In the NBA, play­ers from var­i­ous cities are draft­ed or bought by fran­chis­es from out­side of their home city. Ar­guably the league's biggest star, Le­bron James, is out of the US state of Ohio but rep­re­sents the Mi­a­mi Heat in Flori­da."Fur­ther, NBA fran­chis­es field play­ers past and present who rep­re­sent na­tions such as Chi­na, France, Africa, Turkey and Spain. Eu­ro­pean foot­ball is an­oth­er clas­sic ex­am­ple. Man­ches­ter Unit­ed, which plays in the Eng­lish Pre­mier League, is based in the North Eng­land city of Man­ches­ter but boasts an ar­ray of stars who are nei­ther from the city of Man­ches­ter nor from the Unit­ed King­dom for that mat­ter.

"It is im­por­tant to note that while the ref­er­ences here are to cities, the lim­it­ed ge­o­graph­i­cal space of the Caribbean makes it more prac­ti­cal to utilise the names of coun­tries rather than cities. In fact, the col­lec­tion of sov­er­eign is­land states that is the Caribbean strength­ens the unique­ness of the coun­try fran­chise names!"The of­fi­cial went on to ex­plain: "In­ter­est­ing­ly enough, the fran­chise-type mod­el is al­ready used wide­ly through­out the Caribbean and es­pe­cial­ly in Trinidad and To­ba­go, which boasts very de­vel­oped crick­et and foot­ball leagues. Guyanese, Bar­ba­di­an and Ja­maican play­ers al­ready rep­re­sent lo­cal clubs in the coun­try's crick­et Pre­mier Di­vi­sion, as well as in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Pro League foot­ball tour­na­ments."This free move­ment of Caribbean play­ers to play for clubs in oth­er Caribbean coun­tries is in keep­ing with the cur­rent in­te­gra­tion project in the re­gion, at the heart of which is the free move­ment of work­ers, es­pe­cial­ly sportsper­sons. "The fran­chise struc­ture of the CPL is per­haps one of the best ex­am­ples of this free move­ment of play­ers and best cap­tures one of the ideas of re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion, that of bring­ing the Caribbean clos­er to­geth­er as one eco­nom­ic space. It is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to fos­ter a kin­dred spir­it among Caribbean peo­ple but not nec­es­sar­i­ly na­tion­al­ly. The sup­port for the T&T Red Steel should bring crick­et fans in­to the new era of the game."The CPL bowls off on Ju­ly 30 in Bar­ba­dos with the Bar­ba­dos Tri­dent play­ing the St Lu­cia Zouks.