Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) of the Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) Pe­te Rus­sell had his say on the threat that ex­ter­nal crick­et tour­na­ments pose to the CPL. Rus­sell spoke Mon­day night on CNC 3's 'In­side Edge' pro­gramme which ex­plores the lat­est crick­et news.

The CEO delved in­to the his­to­ry of the CPL as he spoke about the pes­simism amongst many, both sup­port­ers and stake­hold­ers, about the tour­na­ment at its in­cep­tion. These sen­ti­ments de­rived from the poor stan­dard of West In­dies crick­et at the time and the in­tro­duc­tion of this new for­mat of crick­et. Rus­sell said, how­ev­er, the Caribbean swift­ly em­braced this new, unique for­mat and it has now be­come the most viewed ver­sion of the sport.

Rus­sell em­braces all oth­er tour­na­ments in the for­mat, as he sees them as op­por­tu­ni­ties to give play­ers a chance to get ex­pe­ri­ence play­ing crick­et all over the world, which he views as not just good for the CPL, but an as­set to West In­dies crick­et as well.

De­spite be­ing un­able to match the rich­es of Ma­jor League Crick­et or the ever-pop­u­lar IPL (In­di­an Pre­mier League), Rus­sell says that the CPL is cur­rent­ly not los­ing a lot of mon­ey. He spoke about the in­tel­li­gence be­hind the spend­ing and in­vest­ment of funds for the league and praised the new­ly im­ple­ment­ed for­mu­la that works not just com­mer­cial­ly but al­so for stake­hold­ers, gov­ern­ments, fans, play­ers and own­ers.

CEO Rus­sell al­so spoke on the dif­fi­cul­ty of ac­quir­ing for­eign play­ers to com­pete in the league.

"When you look at the crick­et­ing win­dow, it's a chal­lenge. Dur­ing our win­dow (CPL), you have the Asia Cup be­ing played and the se­ries be­tween South Africa and Aus­tralia. So there is lots of flu­id­i­ty with play­ers com­ing in and out and that's some­thing our league has to ac­cept," said the CPL chief ex­ec­u­tive.

Rus­sell un­der­stands that this is the na­ture of league crick­et these days but he al­so says that the CPL has no is­sues with at­tract­ing play­ers de­spite not be­ing paid as well as oth­er leagues.

He al­so un­der­lined the re­laxed en­vi­ron­ment of the Caribbean as be­ing a huge at­trac­tion for for­eign play­ers to vis­it and com­pete in the CPL, stress­ing that de­spite the clash in win­dows, with re­gard to crick­et tour­na­ments, the CPL doesn't have is­sues with at­tract­ing in­ter­na­tion­al play­ers of the high­est cal­i­bre.