Faisalabad Wolves 139/8 (20/20 ov)
Otago 142/2 (17.5/20 ov)
Otago won by 8 wickets (with 13 balls remaining)
Fast bowling is a strength for Volts, who have New Zealand seamers Neil Wagner and Ian Butler among them, in addition to the McCullum brothers and Test opener Hamish Rutherford.
Misbah and Saeed Ajmal are the recognisable names in the Wolves side.
Volts have been training for the tournament in Sri Lanka for the last few weeks, but Wolves have had a more rocky approach to the tournament, having only been granted visas to travel to India four days before this match. The teams will seek at least two wins from their three qualifying games, in order to secure a place in the tournament proper.
Faisalabad Wolves: 1 Ali Waqas, 2 Ammar Mahmood, 3 Asif Ali, 4 Misbah-ul-Haq (capt), 5 Khurram Shehzad, 6 Imran Khalid, 7 Mohammad Salman (wk), 8 Ehsan Adil, 9 Saeed Ajmal, 10 Asad Ali, 11 Samiullah Khan
Otago Volts: 1 Hamish Rutherford, 2 Neil Broom, 3 Brendon McCullum (capt), 4 Aaron Redmond, 5 James Neesham, 6 Nathan McCullum, 7 Derek de Boorder (wk), 8 Ian Butler, 9 Neil Wagner 10 Nick Beard, 11 James McMillan
The Champions League Twenty20 is an idea that works on paper, but its iterations so far have been unloved and not that profitable, making it the useless younger brother of the IPL. Yet the presence of the Faisalabad team, which will now receive some much-deserved attention, provides the competition with the sort of narrative the IPL can't. The story of how they got here is reminiscent of a typical sports movie.
A digression here. Pakistan has two major domestic T20 competitions. In the first half of the season, we have the Faysal Bank T20, a typical 14-team affair, like many elsewhere in the cricketing world. In the second there is the Faysal Bank Super 8 T20 (no one has yet attempted to abbreviate it), where the best eight teams from the Faysal Bank T20 play each other. This was the tournament that Faisalabad wonto make it to the Champions League.
The two-competition calendar ought to be considered too much of a good thing, and would probably have Pakistan's old Test-loving-journos in a tizzy were it not for the fact that it makes complete sense. The second tournament came into being in 2010-11 (which is why Pakistan have had 12 domestic T20 champions in nine years), because of the complete absence of international cricket in a country where the three most popular sports are cricket, complaining and cricket. Furthermore, neither of these competitions takes more than ten days to finish. So, bizarre as it may sound, the PCB got something right.
All good sports movies require an interesting and dominating antagonist; in this case there were three. Antagonist No. 1 was Karachi Dolphins (the better of the two Karachi teams). They are a combination of Real Madrid, because they have half the country's media rooting for them, and Liverpool, because their fans always tell you that this is going to be their year, and it never is. Dolphins have been perennial bridesmaids, having lost the finals in six of the 12 competitions held so far (only Sialkot have more appearances).
Antagonist No. 2 was Lahore Lions (the better of the two Lahore teams, and locally referred to as the Lahore Loins), who had had recent success - including winning the T20 competition in the first half of the season - and the best team on paper. Their top five - Ahmed Shehzad, Nasir Jamshed, Mohammad Hafeez, Kamran and Umar Akmal - are pretty much the top order of the national team. You could even argue that this wasn't their best possible batting line-up since the arrival of Hafeez led to two better players, Mohammad Yousuf and Abdul Razzaq, withdrawing from playing for Lions. Rest assured, a full-strength Lions team (with that batting line-up and a pair of teenage left-arm quicks) would have been Pakistan's best option for any significant performance in the Champions League.
Antagonist No. 3 was the Great Empire itself, Sialkot Stallions. Few, if any, teams have dominated their country quite like Stallions. They had won seven of 11 competitions going into this event, including a run in the late noughties where they won five years in a row, going unbeaten for 25 matches. Their success was based around the batting of Shoaib Malik and Imran Nazir, and more recently Haris Sohail - players who excel on Pakistani pitches, especially when the bowling is below international standard. Sialkot also understood the golden rule of T20 cricket: that it is better to have a quality bowling attack than a quality batting line-up, and their colours had been donned by the likes of Rana Naved, Mohammad Asif, Abdur Rehman and Raza Hasan.
Meanwhile our protagonists, Faisalabad Wolves, had once been mighty, having won the first edition of the domestic T20 in 2004-05, and followed that with a win in the predecessor to the Champions League - theInternational 20:20 Club Championship, held in England in 2005, featuring the best two teams in England and the champions of Sri Lanka, South Africa and Pakistan. Nobody remembers it because this was in the days before India cared about T20.
| In the movie version, Misbah will probably be played by Kevin Costner or Nicolas Cage, reprising the role of a man devoid of human emotions such as love or happiness | |||
Between then and this season's domestic championship, Faisalabad didn't win a trophy. Prior to the start of this season they lost their third-best player, Hafeez, and for this competition (until the final) they didn't have the services of their best player, Saeed Ajmal. Their second-best player now is Khurram Shehzad, a poor man's Hafeez (which really is saying something; except that Shehzad realises he isn't an opener). Their fast bowling trio (Sami Niazi, Asad Ali and Ehsan Adil) is more English than Pakistani - no blood, sweat and tears for them. Their captain, unsurprisingly, is Misbah-ul-Haq, often characterised as the antithesis of inspiration, and they have ten role players who had till then won a combined total of less than 20 international caps. In the movie version, Misbah will probably be played by Kevin Costner or Nicolas Cage, reprising the role of a man devoid of human emotions such as love or happiness. But like in all fairy tales, this ragtag group gelled under the old has-been to achieve the improbable.
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