By Neto Baptiste
Six franchises, comprising local players, will compete in the newly announced Joma Caribbean T10 cricket tournament slated to bowl off on May 2 at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium.
The brainchild of local businessman Amer Hourani, whose Cool & Smooth Clothing and Household Store is behind the popular Cool & Smooth T20 Explosion, the Joma T10 will provide opportunities for top local players to benefit financially.
This is according to chief organiser, Dario Barthley, who explained how the new tournament will work.
“For quite a few years we’ve been getting quite a few comments around playing overseas players and some of our players are better than them, so this year what we implemented is that we didn’t pay any player who participated in the Cool & Smooth T20 as an organisation.
“Some persons would have gotten a stipend from their clubs and so on, which we appreciate because these are professional players, but we didn’t pay any player directly,” he said.
“This T10 now is really just saying, ok, if you’re a top tier T10 player or if you’re selected in the T10 it says that you’re respected as one of the best cricketers in the country in short format amongst your peers and you deserve to receive pay,” he added.
Explaining that the franchises were formed in an effort to allow players to benefit directly, Barthley said the concept is simply to provide an avenue through with players could make some money.
“This is mostly a giveback to the players because there are no clubs so even if you give a prize money to one of the franchises what they will end up doing is splitting it up equally amongst the players, so we tried to make the pay attractive enough that if we don’t get to a point where we can provide significant prize monies that the players would still be comfortable. But the aim is that any sponsorship that comes in will be redistributed to, obviously covering our expenses first, but everything else is going into the cricket and into the cricketers,” he said.
Each franchise, Barthley revealed, will be led by a player handpicked by the organisers to do so. That same player will also be tasked with handpicking a coach and manager for the franchise.
“There are 14 players per team, the captains were decided by … and I would say I went with the Leeward Islands players and West Indies players or there and thereabout, so it started off with Jimbo [Rahkeem Cornwall], Hayden Walsh Jr, Booby [Devon Thomas], Kofi James, Justin Athanaze and Orlando Peters and those are guys who would have played a higher level of cricket,” he said.
The franchises, Hawksbills, Rockets, Renegades, Rangers, Chargers, and Pacers, will compete for supremacy over the next 10 days with the tournament set to climax on May 12 at the North Sound venue.
On Tuesday, Rangers take on Chargers at 5pm, Rockets play Pacers at 7.30pm and Renegades face Hawksbills at 10pm.
