Where A New Franchise League Fits In The Cricket Calendar

Launching a franchise league is less a commercial problem than a calendar one. The window a competition occupies determines which players can realistically appear in it.

The calendar is already fully allocated

International cricket, established franchise competitions and domestic seasons occupy most of the year across both hemispheres. Genuinely empty windows barely exist.

A new league therefore either overlaps something or takes a period nobody wanted, usually for reasons of weather or local sporting competition.

Both options impose costs. Overlap restricts the player pool, and an undesirable window restricts attendance and broadcast value.

Overlap decides who is available

A league running alongside an established competition competes for the same players, and those with existing contracts will generally honor them.

The available pool then consists of players not retained elsewhere, plus those whose national commitments happen to be light in that period.

This is why a new competition's early squads look unbalanced. The constraint is availability, not the willingness to pay.

National boards control release

Players require clearance from their home board to appear in a foreign domestic league, and boards withhold it when the window collides with their own priorities.

Because release is discretionary, a league's viability depends on relationships with boards as much as on its own organization.

Some boards restrict release generally to protect their domestic competitions, which shapes which nationalities appear in which leagues worldwide.

A protected window is the real prize

Where the world body designates a period during which limited international cricket is scheduled, the league occupying it can access nearly every player.

Such windows are scarce and contested, and securing one requires agreement among boards whose own competitions would be affected.

The difference between a protected window and an ordinary one is larger than any difference in prize money. It is the structural advantage that compounds.

Local infrastructure sets the ceiling

Venue quality, turf availability and the number of grounds able to host at professional standard limit how many matches can be staged and where.

In markets where cricket is not established, purpose-built or converted facilities take years, so early editions run in a small number of venues.

Growth is therefore constrained by construction timelines rather than by demand. A league can sell out every match it stages and still be unable to stage more of them.

Expansion plans consequently follow ground availability rather than commercial appetite. The number of teams a competition can add is decided by turf and floodlights years before it is decided by investors.

For a long time the deep coverage was the closest thing basketball had to a safe answer. Keep the big near the rim, make the guard fight over the top, live with a mid range jumper. Then somebody put a screen on the retreating big himself, and safe stopped being safe.

The action is easy to describe. Standard ball screen on the wing. As the centre backs towards the paint, a third offensive player, usually whoever is guarded by the least reliable helper, sets a screen on him from behind. The big is now being asked to backpedal into a stationary body he cannot see. He fights through and arrives late, or he goes around and the roller has a straight line to the rim, or the defence switches and a guard is left trying to box out a centre.

What I like about it as a piece of design is that it attacks the coverage rather than the personnel. Most counters hunt the weak defender. This one punishes the strong one. The better your rim protector, the more committed he is to that retreat, and the more the screen behind him hurts.

Every defensive answer is uncomfortable. Pre switch the screener before contact, which needs two players to talk through crowd noise while both are watching the ball. Jump the big out to the level and refuse to be a stationary target, which gives up the pocket pass. Or tag the backscreener early with the low man, which by definition opens the corner you were trying to protect in the first place.

None of it is free, and that is the whole point. Good design does not manufacture an open shot. It manufactures a decision where every branch costs something, taken by a defender with a third of a second and eighteen thousand people shouting at him.

The version I would run more often is the fake. Show the screen, never set it, and let the big react to a threat that does not arrive. He hesitates for a beat. A beat is a layup.

Whoever first drew this up understood something coaches say far too rarely, which is that the most vulnerable man in any scheme is usually the one doing exactly what he was told to do.