Vin­ode Mam­chan

West In­dies all-rounder Dwayne Bra­vo will be the seed­ed play­er based in Port-of-Spain for the up­com­ing in­au­gur­al T20 Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL).

The or­gan­is­er of the tour­na­ment Verus In­ter­na­tion­al has con­tract­ed six seed­ed play­ers from the Caribbean and they are Bra­vo, West In­dies cap­tain Dar­ren Sam­my, mas­ter blaster Chris Gayle, mys­tery spin­ner Sunil Nar­ine, Ja­maican Mar­lon Samuels and big-hit­ter Ke­iron Pol­lard.

They have spread these six play­ers around the six teams in or­der to bring a lev­el of com­pet­i­tive­ness to each fran­chise. Bra­vo will be based in Trinidad with the Port-of-Spain fran­chise.

The oth­er two Trinida­di­ans Pol­lard and Nar­ine, how­ev­er, will not join him in Port-of-Spain. Nar­ine goes south to George­town in Guyana, while Pol­lard goes North to Bridgetown in Bar­ba­dos.

Gayle, who cre­at­ed a num­ber of world records in the In­di­an Pre­mier League (IPL) on Tues­day, will stay in his na­tive Ja­maica and line up with the Kingston fran­chise. Fel­low Ja­maican Mar­lon Samuels will be in the St John's fran­chise in An­tigua. Sam­my re­mains at home and will play for the St Lu­cian fran­chise.

Verus has al­so con­tract­ed a num­ber of in­ter­na­tion­al stars and so far they have re­vealed that Aus­tralian Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting, Pak­istani Mo­hammed Hafeez and New Zealand's Ross Tay­lor.

In­for­ma­tion reach­ing T&T Guardian is that the for­mer Aus­tralian cap­tain and cur­rent Mum­bai In­di­ans skip­per Ponting has in­di­cat­ed to the or­gan­is­ers that he wants to play for the Trinidad fran­chise so he will be join­ing Bra­vo at the Queen's Park Oval, much to the de­light of lo­cal crick­et fans.

Hafeez is ex­pect­ed to go to Guyana and at this point in time it is not clear where Gilchrist and Tay­lor would go. It is un­der­stood that South African Her­shelle Gibbs is in talks with the or­gan­is­ers and will be head­ing to Bar­ba­dos once his con­tract de­tails are sort­ed out.

Each of the fran­chis­es will have 15 play­ers and in­clud­ed in this num­ber will be four in­ter­na­tion­al play­ers and four un­der-23 play­ers. The teams can be made up of any num­ber of re­gion­al play­ers.

The in­au­gur­al CPL, which is en­dorsed by the West In­dies Crick­et Board and has re­placed the re­gion­al T20 tour­na­ment, is tar­get­ing a sub­stan­tial re­gion­al and glob­al tele­vi­sion au­di­ence and is slat­ed to run for four weeks from Ju­ly 29 to Au­gust 26. A to­tal of 32 match­es are sched­uled to be played.

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