No draws this time

As has been fairly obvious, the West Indies are not the formidable Twenty20 machine that they used to be, despite still producing talented white-ball players. One major issue with this is that in their domestic Twenty20 cricket, they have only the six-team Caribbean Premier League and nothing else to fall back on.

The result is that even players on the fringes of the national team have very little experience in Twenty20 cricket: Justin Greaves (age 27, 8 T20 matches), Shamarh Brooks (age 33, 38 T20 matches), Kjorn Ottley (age 32, 3 T20 matches), Josh da Silva (age 23, 13 T20 matches), Khary Pierre (age 30, 50 T20 matches), Romario Shepherd (age 27, 41 T20 matches), John Campbell (age 28, 10 T20 matches), Chandrapaul Hemraj (age 28, 33 T20 matches), Roston Chase (age 29, 31 T20 matches), and Jermaine Blackwood (age 30, 27 T20 matches) are all examples of players who are in and around the white-ball team, but have little prior experience of high-level white-ball cricket.

This has occurred because of a curious agreement whereby Cricket West Indies sold the rights to host Twenty20 cricket in the Caribbean to the owners of the Caribbean Premier League. The Caribbean Premier League exists first and foremost to make money for its owners, and the quickest way to do that is by signing the biggest names - and the biggest names in West Indies cricket have held a near-monopoly over the 42 places across six playing XIs that are reserved for local players, regardless of if they aren't actually very good, or are approaching middle-age. And this makes sense - are you more likely to pick the known quantity (that Andre Fletcher will probably average about 25 with one big innings in the tournament) or the unknown quantity (that Justin Greaves could do considerably worse than that).

With the West Indies having sold off the rights to run a secondary domestic competition like the Vitality Blast, Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy or National T20 Cup, they have to think outside of the box if they want to lessen the impact of this problem.

One way this could be done would be to join up with the CPL and its franchises to run six small pre-CPL leagues ahead of the main CPL tournament, similar to how leagues like the TNPL exist. The teams in these hypothetical leagues could look vaguely like this:

Barbados League

• Carlton
• Empire
• Pickwick
• Wanderers

Guyana League