After the final list of players were submitted to the various franchises, the most crucial Hero Caribbean Premier League (CPL) draft to date takes place today in London, England.
The marquee event will be televised and streamed for fans around the world to watch the teams select their squads for the 2018 tournament.
Today’s draft holds slightly more interest following the drastic increase of players that are included for the sixth edition of the ‘Biggest Party In Sport.’
This year, the number of players that have put their names forward for selection to the six franchise teams has increased from 258 in 2017 to 348 with 227 of those players coming from out of the Caribbean while 121 are Regional players.
Rashid Khan
The international players are from 18 countries where 53 are from Pakistan and 32 from Sri Lanka while the other 142 are from England, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Ireland, Canada, USA, Oman, Hong Kong, Scotland, Nepal, UAE and Kenya.
Some of the players that will be available for selection or retention are Brendon McCullum, Chris Lynn, Mohammad Amir, D’Arcy Short, Kieron Pollard, Chris Gayle, Hashim Amla, Shahid Afridi and Usman Khawaja as well as English players Alex Hales and Adil Rashid.
Sohail Tanveer
Additionally, this year the tournament window means that all West Indies players are also available for the duration of the tournament. Prior to today’s draft, teams are allowed to retain as much of their players from 2017 and will complement their squads by selecting from the wider pool of players in the draft as well as a player from the ICC Americas.
Speaking about the broadcast being available across these various platforms, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hero CPL, Damien O’Donohoe, said: “The Hero CPL draft is where we begin the buildup to the Biggest Party in Sport and we are delighted that fans from around the world will be able to watch as teams fill their rosters with the best players from across the cricketing globe. The Hero CPL continues to grow year on year and with all West Indies players being available for the 2018 tournament the standard of cricketing talent on display is better than ever.”
The draft gets underway at 11:00h Guyana time (15:00h GMT, 20:30h IST, 11:000h ECT, 10:00h EST) at the state of the art Gfinity eSports arena in London. There will be analysis from Daren Ganga and Harsha Bhogle who will be discussing the world-class cricketers that will be taking part in this year’s tournament that gets underway on 8 August.
Meanwhile, the following platforms will be showing the broadcast: Facebook – www.facebook.com/CarnivalT20; Twitter – www.twitter.com/CPL and Sportsmax across the Caribbean.
In the 2017 edition of the tournament, Chadwick Walton was the leading run scorer with 458 runs at an average of 41.63 in 12 matches for the Guyana Amazon Warriors while Luke Ronchi who was a replacement for martin Guptil (142 runs from 7 matches) topped the averages with 57.33 after scoring 172 runs in four matches. Jason Mohammed who had a dream season in 2016 scored 292 runs in 12 matches while Gajanand Singh made 151 runs from 11 matches in his debut season last year.
With the ball, Sohail Tanveer picked up 17 wickets, Rashid Khan 16 and Rayad Emrit 15. Against the Barbados Tridents in Bridgetown, Tanveer took 5 for 3, the best figures in 2017 while Khan was the most economical going for just 5.82 runs per over.
