The first season of the Indian Premier League is underway, and already, it has captured the imagination of the viewing public and the players alike, like no other. And with the kind of cash that has flown in, the orgy-of-cricket can only get bigger. However, there is one country, England, which is missing out on a little fun here. If one discounts Dmitri Mascarhenhas, no other English player has been signed up for the tournament, and that includes star attractions like Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen.  The reason has been simple; the English cricketers have been asked by the ECB bosses, including Chairman, Mr. Giles Clarke, to focus on county cricket to be match fit for the New Zealand series. He says, "The England team is the critical part of the economics of our game and having the best players available is critical to that. The reason we have England central contracts is to enable the head coach to determine how much cricket those who were centrally contracted played."

Clarke goes on to add that the English cricketers would be needed to be totally fit, physically and mentally, before the next home Ashes series, and playing in such a tournament could take away from the rest periods between series.

The point here that Giles Clarke makes is quite fair, and in fact, pretty logical. However, the fact of the matter that remains is, a player of the stature of a Pietersen or a Flintoff, would have probably got signed up for at least an $800,000, for playing in the inaugural season. With the limiting cap clause on the player buyouts been shown the door, this could go up manifold in the years to come. This would be many times more than what their central contract would pay them through the period of the contract. This Catch-22 situation that the players find themselves in, i.e. choosing between playing for their country against participating in the IPL, has very few takers. Pietersen finds it silly and says, "You want your best players playing both for their country and for the IPL. You don't want them choosing between the two"

This would necessarily get resolved in only one of the few ways possible, either these iconic cricketers would start giving up their English caps for the IPL, or they may not want to sign central contracts with the ECB any more. The only other two options that ECB may have is to provide for a window for these cricketers to "ply their trade" at the IPL, or create an EPL of their own, that pays similar sums of amount.

The creation of window would need a sanction from the ICC, conjuring up an EPL would need money. Adam Stanford has agreed to bankroll such a tournament, only after he is convinced of it being a value proposition. This may take at least a couple of years, and still, there are question marks over its feasibility.

In the end, the ECB would need to be careful about not treading into territories where they end up losing the players of the calibre of Andrew Flintoff, Collingwood, Pietersen and the likes.

There is a nice little anecdote about Chris Gayle text messaging Kevin Pietersen asking him for the reasons for his absence from this jamboree. When Pietersen replied that he just can't, Gayle's retort was a message that had only dollar signs! Now while, Gayle and Pietersen have an on-field history attached to them, the underlying meaning is hard to miss. A hundred grand a game, over a period of six weeks is not what any of these players would want to miss out on.

We have recently launched our new sms text messaging features to allow you to better communicate with the members of your club.

Text messaging in a hitssports club website can be used to send messages to individual members or a group of members within your club.  You can select members who belong to a specific squad, club officials, or members selected for a specific game, or just choose your members individually.  The text message is then sent out to all the members you specify, allowing a much quicker response to any enquiries.

Text messaging can additionally be used to send out selection notifications.  When you pick your team on one of our sports club websites, a notification is sent out to all members who have been selected.  They are then requested to respond to the message they receive, simply by replying with the text YES or NO.  This reply is routed back through the website, and ensures availability is updated on the website, and captains are notified of a players confirmation.  This dramatically simplifies your selection process, you can be sure that you are going to have a full side for your match, with the minimum amount of effort involved in phoning players.  The captain can see in one place to see who has confirmed, and who he or she needs to contact (hopefully no one), your club website acts as a communication hub and saves your club captains phoning around all your players each week.

Having watched yet another football match where the players constantly spoke back and swore at the referee, I wonder if it is about time that something was done to change this.

The obvious comparison is with Rugby (Both Rugby Union and Rugby league) where backchat from players is virtually unheard of.  In the rare instances this occurs this is punished by moving a penalty forward in the opposition's favour or a sin bin.  Players know that foul language directed towards the referee will not be tolerated, why is it that football is different?  Rugby players call the referee "Sir" where as what many footballers call the referee cannot be repeated!  Having played both club football and club rugby I feel this difference is a marked one, but it would be so simple to change.

If the premier league were to to take a stance on this and book or send of players for foul language, as the law of the game allows, then players would very quickly learn.  Quite possibly there would a few weeks of mayhem, as players became accustomed to the new implementation of the laws, but it wouldn't take long to settle down.  The behaviour exhibited by football superstars is undoubtedly emulated by children across the country, and the example that is currently set is that this behaviour is acceptable.  As the major populist sport in the UK, football is part of every day life for many of us, and as such impacts much more than just how people behave on Sunday league football pitches across the country.  A wholesale change to how football is refereed in terms of player discipline would send a clear message to football obsessed youngsters that that sort of behaviour is not acceptable.

 

This is the new Hitssports.com blogging platform.  We've integrated this new blogging platform into our main website, we think it just makes more sense that way, rather than having two separate websites.

This will become a more active area where we will post on the Hitssports system, and comment on recent sporting stories of interest.

In development is our new Events calendar.  This will allow you to manage your club’s events through your website in the same way as you can already manage teams for fixtures. A simple example of how this feature might be used is to simply display a calendar of all upcoming events at the club, a more [...]

We recently agreed a 3 year deal to sponsor Old Chelmsfordians Cricket club in Essex.  This is an exciting opportunity for us to support grass roots cricket, within a forward thinking club.

Below are pictures of our banners at the ground.

 

We have recently launched a range of upgrades to the photo gallery feature of the website. Hitssports.com users can now upload video just as easily as uploading images to their photo galleries. Video uploads are automatically converted to a web ready format, and these are then streamed from within the photo gallery area of the [...]

Thought I’d take the time to post about what we’ve been working on recently and wsome of what we are planning for the future.  It’s been a really busy time here at Hitssports the last few months.  We’ve been gearing up to support Football, Rugby and Hockey clubs and now that’s completed we’ve been improving a [...]

We’ve launched a new design for the main Hitssports.com website today. This comes only 3 short months after we launched the previous design! We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the stats we get through Google Analytics. We noticed that while the traffic we’ve been getting has been steadily increasing the [...]

Often sports clubs will within their ranks contain at least one person capable of building a website for their club.  Many clubs have an existing website that is maintained by one person within the club.  The difficultly is often that the burden of updates fall all on one person.  This can be fine when the [...]