The Caribbean Premiere League was played for the first time in the year 2013. This was the Caribbean’s answer to the modernizing of the game. The Caribbean is a part of the world which has seen a great amount of cricket and has been a known force in the shortest form of cricket. The CPL consisted of 6 teams from different cities of the Caribbean. The teams that were the part of the inaugural tournament were known as Antigua Hawksbills, Barbados Tridents, Jamaica Tallawahs, Trinidad & Tobago Red Steel, Guyana Amazon Warriors and St Lucia Zouks. Each team is associated with a city and plays against each other in the league stage.
These teams consisted of players from the Caribbean and some of the well renowned international stars from the world of cricket. According to the format of this league each teams play seven games in the league stage and the winning team earns 2 points from every game. These points are added up to the points table and at the end of the league stage the top four teams qualify for the next round. The team finishing first position would play the first semi-final against the fourth placed team and the second placed team was to play the third placed team in the second semi-final. Winners of both the semi-finals played the final of the tournament.
The first game of the league saw Barbados Tridents host the St Lucia Zouks. The first match saw a good fighting match which eventually was won by the Tridents. In the first half of the league the Barbados Tridents emerged as the winners in all the four games that they played. The team emerged in the league as the team to be beaten. With four wins out of 7 the team already was well placed in the knockout stage. The second best team in the first stage was Guyana Amazon Warriors. The team from Guyana with 3 wins came to the second position in the table after the first phase of the league matches. Trinidad &Tobago Red Steel was a solid team on papers but they never started off well. In the three matches they lost all of them. St. Lucia Zouks and Antigua Hawksbills were placed in the bottom of the table.
Soon the tables turned out in the later stage of the tournament as the top team failed to win any of the remaining matches and Guyana Amazon Warriors emerged as table toppers with 5 wins followed by Jamaica Tallawahs. The once table topper reached to the third position and Trinidad & Tobago Red Steels entered the knockout stages in 4th position after 3 wins in the league stage. In the first semi-final the Guyana Amazon Warriors met the Trinidad & Tobago Red Steels met Guyana Amazon Warriors. In this match the Red Steels batted first and didn’t put up a good score. The Warriors won the match comfortably and became the first team to enter the finals of inaugural CPL. In the second semi-final of the tournament the Jamaica Tallawahs and Barbados Tridents met. It was a thrilling game which saw a blasting innings by Andre Russell in the end of the innings managed to score 29 off 6 balls to take the Tallawahs to the finals of the CPL 2013.
The final match of the CPL never lived up to the expectation as the warriors batting first didn’t score runs thus making it easy for the Tallawahs. It was a comfortable win for the team from Jamaica as Gayle played an anchor role while Russell managed to hit the winning runs yet again. The CPL ended but it gave some great moments to the world of cricket. Shakib Al Hassan taking 6 wickets by giving away only 6 runs was an epic moment for the fans in Caribbean. Andre Russell also gave one of the outstanding batting performances of the cricketing history scoring 29 runs of 6 balls. He scored 4 6’s of 4 consecutive balls a sight to remember. This form of cricket is sure to stay as according to the fans in Caribbean believes that this is the way to help the young players grow.
CPL T20 Edition - CPL 2013, CPL 2014, CPL 2015, CPL 2016, CPL 2017, CPL 2018, CPL 2019, CPL 2020, CPL 2021