12 Comments

I’m glad you confirmed with Dave Warner it was real. Could have been cricket’s version of ‘Capricorn One’.

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I like to think that he isn't paid to play, rather paid to say that he is playing and got out for not many. The Cayman's just send around a "scorecard" to everyone who "played" so everyone is singing off the same sheet so to speak.

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I could give a bash at reporting on it. Someone just pay for my air fares and accommodation.

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Cricket Et Al isn’t hiring just yet, but if we get a few more subscribers, who knows? Got to say covering a bit of hit and giggle in the Caymans would be a nice gig. Even with the cricket.

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Camus presciently captured the challenge of reporting of on franchise cricket many decades ago

The absurd is born of the encounter between two opposed concepts: the human need for meaning and the apparent meaninglessness of the universe.

GH has made the point more succinctly elsewhere "the IPL is still on".

I admire those journos and commentators who try (or have) to earn a living making copy from this cricketing gruel. Perhaps with the advance of AI, we can deploy these random prose generators to cover the random number generation of franchise cricket whose financial backers remind me of a modern day Maharaja of Porbandar.

Deploying AI, we can unburden our own human suffering trying to find existentialist meaning in this mobius strip cricket, perpetually in motion towards the next tournament, the players supers swelling like team affliations on a cricinfo player profile.

The sun sat on the British Empire, driven as it were by the political imperatives and constraints of empire; its progeny, cricket, does not labour under the same conditions. Only of market conditions and whether the market is sated by another game of cricket. Too much is never enough.

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Or alternatively, given that humans possess all sorts of hard-to-manage (or unmanageable) traits, we could have AI comment on AI games. Simulacra of simulacra. Reportage, and cricket, would then be perfectly positioned for the data-driven needs of AI. That would be the truest expression of the market conditions...

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What on earth is Warner doing playing these invisible comps? He can't need the money, surely. Perhaps he's in the Cayman Islands to open a new bank account? Distinguished players, especially with illustrious Test careers, should bow out gracefully at the top, not playing this crap.

Sorry to be picky, but isn't it de Grandhomme? I seem to recall he did something special in Australia once, batted forever, held up an end or something?

Good article BTW

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Fascinating story. I read these things about these T20 franchise competitions and often think they’re a late April Fools joke, or an early one. Someone’s made it all up for a laugh; the location, the team names, famous players playing. Fair dinkum they’d play on the Moon, perhaps even Mars, if they could, if not for lack of oxygen, as lack of crowd interest doesn’t seem to be an issue, because someone will surely get the TV rights.

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Waiting until Pete finds the Spice Isle T10

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The what?

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Mission accomplished? Here we are reading about it.

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"If a wicket falls in a field in the Cayman Islands and no one reads the scorecard in Cricinfo" may be one for the cricket loving Wittgenstein to ponder posthumously. Does being ICC approved mean it is overseen by its ant-corruption unit? At least it is not a fake tournament, like the Sri Lanka Uva T20 league which was manufactured by an Indian "businessman" as a gambling sting - https://www.foxsports.com.au/cricket/australia/indian-cricket-uvat20-tournament-australian-cricket-news-police-ravinder-dandiwal-sri-lanka-farveez-mahroof/news-story/4fa88ffeb3e2902df9d79c121d7513ad

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