Triangular one day tourney begins today

Ranjan Anandaappa in Australia

CRICKET: After an electrifying and highly controversial Test series between Australia and India world champions Australia, runners-up Sri Lanka and India will feature of what will be the final triangular one day cricket tournament in Australia (known as the Commonwealth Bank Series) as host Australia will take on India in the 'curtain raiser' match at the Brisbane Cricket grounds today (Sunday) in a day/night match.

Brisbane Cricket Ground, the major sports stadium for Queensland State (known as the Sunshine State) is popularly known as the Gabba. The Gabba was first established in 1895 and has been hosting Test cricket from 1931.

It was also the venue for the first tied Test match in 1960 which involved Australia and the West Indies captained by Richie Benaud (Australia) and the late Sir Frank Worell (West Indies).

Cricket Australia has already announced that the Tri- Nation one-day tournament will be scrapped after Feb/March 2008 series that also involves Sri Lanka. It is conceivable that in future, Australia will invite two teams separately during summer for one-day matches.

This revised format avoids the matches that do not involve Australia and will also provide more flexibility in the summer cricket calendar and some respite for the local players.

Matches involving Australia attracts bigger crowds and potentially enhance the financial viability in one-day cricket in Australia. It will also curtail the number of 'dead' matches that are inevitably played due to the number of qualifying matches under the tournament format.

The current CB series started in 1979/80 as the Benson and Hedges tournament and continued every summer. The idea of a tri-nation one day tournament sprung out of the settlement between the Australian Cricket Board and the late Kerry Packer in 1979.

As part of the deal, a one-day event which included day/night matches and coloured clothing introduced during the World Series cricket was created for Packer's Channel Nine.

The tournament was known at a time as VB series after the sponsor Victoria Bitter, a popular beer in Australia. In 1994/95 an Australian 'A' team competed as the fourth team in the tourney as an experiment.

In the tournament's 29-year history, India has participated 5 times, reaching the finals thrice. Sri Lanka had made the trip down under seven times and had reached the finals on two occasions in 1995/96 and 2005/2006. Neither India nor Sri Lanka had beaten Australia in the finals to clinch the trophy.

Sri Lanka, however, managed once to take the best of three finals to the third match when they toured Australia in 2006, by defeating Australia in Adelaide. That was the match that Tillekeratne Dilshan brilliantly ran out 4 top Australian batsmen.