Need to ensure domestic T20 does not prejudice international cricket: ICC

Kolkata, April 26 (CRICKETNMORE) - Stating that the recent spurt in the number of domestic Twenty20 leagues is at times impacting the international bilateral cricket schedule, ICC Chief Executive David Richardson on Thursday said "clever planning, better scheduling and a regulatory framework" is necessary to ensure these tournaments can continue without adversely affecting international cricket.

Hailing the emergence of domestic T20 leagues as a tremendous boost for the game's popularity across age and gender, Richardson said regulations like creating specific windows to suit those leagues in the cricketing calendar and restrictions on players playing in more than a certain number of leagues need to be looked into from "a practical and legal perspective".

"One of the biggest challenges to the game is caused by the proliferation of domestic T20 leagues. While this has been tremendous in helping us grow and attract fans, especially younger and female fans, there are occasions when domestic leagues, because they are multiplying and are being played all over the globe, are competing for time in the schedule with the international bilateral cricket," Richardson told reporters after the week-long of ICC meetings here.

"Not only are these leagues coming up in full member countries, but we have private entrepreneurs arranging these leagues in a number of associate countries. So we need to look at our regulations as to how they control and deal with the approval of those competitions to make sure that we can allow and encourage them but only in a way that does not prejudice international cricket and in particular, the chance of the best players playing international cricket," he added.

The official said the task would not be easy to schedule everything within a season that goes on from October to March for the eight major cricketing nations and revealed that ICC has formed a group of committee members and lawyers to solve that problem.

"We have appointed a group of members of the chief executive committee plus the representatives of the player association to work with lawyers who specialise in that field to come up with a framework that can help us solve that problem," he added.