Jimmy trashes Twenty20 carnival

While the Indian Premier League (IPL) bandwagon reached dizzy heights last week over the unprecedented players auction, gutsy allrounder of India’s World Cup winning team, Mohinder Amarnath, isn’t amused.
In his trademark candid style, Amarnath came down heavily on the ongoing hype and hoopla surrounding the IPL carnival, slamming the Indian cricket Board for promoting Twenty20 cricket and roping in foreign players.

“Twenty20 cricket has no future at all, it makes no sense to promote it on this scale. And why do we need foreign players I just don’t understand. The focus should have been on domestic talent,” fumed Amarnath on the sidelines of a local cricket tournament in the city. The 57-year-old former player was particularly severe on the cricket administrators for allowing the IPL’s organisers to stage the widely-covered auction ceremony in Mumbai where the world’s top players were traded for phenomenal sums of money.

“There was no need at all to organise an auction like this where the players were being bought by teams. There’s a better way of handling things. The organisers should have gone about handing out contracts to the players instead of making them go through the auction,” asserted the Man-of-Match of the 1983 World Cup final.

Amarnath’s acerbic comments are no surprise, given that the player has a record of being vocal on various issues, often voicing against the BCCI on controversial matters.

Stressing on the need to revert to Test cricket, Amarnath opined: “These new formats of the game have no future. Test cricket will still remain as the best form of the game, there can’t be any doubt about that.”

As for the selectors’ decision to leave out stalwart names like Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly from the ongoing tri-nation series in Australia, the former allrounder said that he felt pity for the experienced duo. “Both of them should have been part of this ODI team, I feel sorry for both of them. It looks really bad, given the way Sourav is repeatedly made to prove himself and come back,” Amarnath said.

http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Jimmy-trashes-Twenty20-carnival/276821/