DID you tune into the IPL cricket coverage this year?

How about, the current Airtel Champions League T20 tournament in South Africa?

To be honest, as cricketing a nut as I am it’s all a bit too false and meaningless for me and I barely gave it a second look. Give me an old-fashioned Test, or a 50-over international any day.

So what can we expect from the newly-announced ‘GPL’ other than that neither Sky Sports, Eurosport or ESPN will be hounding the Guernsey Cricket Board for exclusive broadcasting rights.

There will be no dancing girls and no dodgy bookies, not from the sub-continent anyway, at the KGV next June when Guernsey’s newest cricket competition takes place.

Will it work and do what it says on David Nussbaumer’s tin of unadulterated enthusiasm?

The answer to that has to be ‘who knows’, but I must admit to liking the broad idea.

What is key, of course, is that the four sets of teams are not only evenly matched but also up for it. In other words, it is one thing bidding for and recruiting a player, but we live in an amateur world and if the player does not want to play, you can’t force him to.

Should too many ‘picks’ stay away then it will fail as did this summer’s one-off ELT20, which started promisingly but quickly fizzled out.

That scenario will probably not be a problem, but most important of all is the choice of player-coach to head up each franchise. Those four ‘name’ players have to buy into the project and not simply turn up and take the money.

The overseas players, and Sussex’s former England fast bowler James Kirtley is expected to be one, can largely make or break this event. Playing at their best they, alone, will be worth seeing.

Should they commit fully, which means playing hard and leading their team in the truest sense of the word, and they will entertain and be good value.

But if those players are at half-cock, or half-cut as we have too often seen county players in end-of-season bashes, then the audience will see straight through the whole thing. It will be half the way to being worthless.

What’s good about the proposed ‘GPL’ project is that it crammed into a  relatively short period. It can therefore be sold properly to both public and media and, let’s hope, play a major role in dragging people back into watching the game and, dare I say it, the evening league which it is to revert to tradition.

It should be remembered that Guernsey were playing T20 decades before anyone else. We had a successful formula which was simple and suited our island lifestyle. Leave work and within half-an-hour you could be on the field.

But we have tinkered with it too much in my view and to a degree have taken the gloss off the old evening game which in Division One terms was the biggest prize to win.

Weekend cricket has taken over and it’s time the shorter game hit back.

IT was amiss of me not to mention last week the brilliant efforts of our senior golf team winning at La Moye.

I class it among the major miracles of modern local sport. I’m not joking.

In two decades of covering inter-island golf it almost became an assumption that Guernsey would not win in Jersey and to win at La Moye, which crops up on the inter-insular rota every four Septembers, was a ridiculous suggestion.

And that is what I told Guernsey’s non-playing captain David Rowlinson when I bumped into him at the Horse of the Year Show, a fortnight before the 2010 CI version of the Ryder Cup.

He knew the stat all too well. Guernsey had not won at the elevated west coast Jersey course since 1969 and, most generally, the Greens never got close to winning.

But we did, of course, and I offer my humble apologies to Dave and his team for writing them off. I will buy that round of drinks lads.

You have deservedly won a place on the shortlist for Sportingbbet’s CI team of the year.

WHATEVER happens in Split this long weekend of Uefa Regions Cup football, I predict there will be new faces in Tony Vance’s squad when it comes around to the business end of the season, the Murattis.

Scott Bougourd may well be one, the young Northerner consistently impressing in the opening weeks of the island’s stuttering domestic campaign, and Saints striker Luke Winch (pictured).

Bougourd will be a coach’s dream, Winch much more hard work but nevertheless probably worth it.

I can easily see Winch’s orange boots filling those of the cruelly injured Dave Rihoy and if the island coaching team can get the youngster to fully focus on the task ahead – i.e. working full out for the team and not merely for himself, not to mention maximising his fitness levels – Guernsey will have another exciting attacking option to throw at Alderney and Jersey.

He is the obvious replacement for Rihoy. I wonder if he can see that and will grab the chance?