Former Australia
legspinner Shane Warne has confirmed that he has booked three of the most
famous baseball grounds in the United States of America as venues for a series of exhibition T20 matches
that will feature retired international players. Warne said that Wrigley
Field in Chicago, the Yankee Stadium in New York and the Dodger Stadium in Los
Angeles had been booked as venues for games likely to be held in November. The
series in the USA
is part of a league planned by Warne and Sachin Tendulkar that aims to hold
exhibition matches around the world over a three-and-a half- year period.
The idea, reportedly,
is to take matches to places where fans are starved of good quality cricket, and
Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong and UAE are also being looked at as venues. “At
this stage we’ve booked three stadiums, Wrigley Field, Yankee Stadium and Dodger
Stadium,” Warne told News Ltd. “We’re going to have Bollywood-theme nights and
it’s all shaping up pretty well.” All three baseball venues have also hosted
other sporting events, including American football, soccer and ice hockey, and
each stadium can host more than 40,000 spectators. Wrigley Field is the home of
the Chicago Cubs baseball team, while the Yankee Stadium and the Dodger Stadium
are home venues for the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers. The
exhibition cricket matches are likely to be scheduled after the end of the 2015
Major League Baseball season in October.
Warne said he and
Tendulkar had come up with the idea for promoting the game, inspired by the
exhibition basketball team, the Harlem Globetrotters. “Myself and Sachin had an
idea – why not
take cricket to
America and be the Harlem Globetrotters, go around and do free exhibitions at
schools … help grow the game of cricket (in a country where there are already)
45 teams in LA?” Warne said. According to Warne, 28 players, including Glenn
McGrath, Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis, Adam Gilchrist, Sourav Ganguly, VVS
Laxman, Brian Lara and Wasim Akram,
have signed on for
the series.
He also said the organisers were in
talks with the ICC and the USA Cricket Association for their involvement and
support. “We’ve signed around 28 players who have all said, ‘If you and Sachin
are doing it, we’d like to do it as well’,” Warne said. “We’ve got all the
players you’d want to see from the past 20 years. Part of the all-stars idea is
we go around and the people who haven’t had the opportunity to see these guys
play over the years because they’re based in the States can come. “We’ve met
with the ICC who are very happy to be on board with us so we just want them to
be official partners with us. We’re speaking with the American Cricket Association
to make sure they can help us as well.”