The foundational edition of the Sri Lanka Premier League (SLPL), after facing a series of problems including the pulling out of Indian players from the event, has been postponed to August 2012. SLPL was scheduled to start on July 19.

SLC to go ahead with inter-provincial T20 tournament

In its place, the Sri Lankan cricket board (SLC) has decided to go ahead with the inter-provincial T20 tournament that will be played to decide the qualifying side for the Champions League T20 qualifiers. But that tournament will not involve any foreign players.

The pronouncement came after at a meeting between the new committee of Cricket Sri Lanka and the organizers of league, Somerset Entertainment Ventures (SEV) which was alleged to be the bone of contention.

BCCI had refused to release its players

Last month, BCCI had refused to release its twelve players for the abortive contest including Munaf Patel, Praveen Kumar, Irfan Pathan, R Ashwin, Dinesh Karthik, Manoj Tiwary, Ravindra Jadeja, Saurabh Tiwary, Vinay Kumar, Umesh Yadav, Manish Pandey and Paul Valthaty after it was whispered that the tournament is actually organized by Singapore based SEV, which is considered close to suspended IPL chief Lalit Modi.
SEV has succeeded the commercial rights of the event which absconds the SLC with audibly little stake in the management of competition.

SLC held several meetings with Indian Board officials to convince them but all attempts concluded unproductive.

Another foremost waft the league suffered was that the SLC committee that fashioned the event was dissolved last week by Sri Lanka’s sports ministry, on the grounds of corruption charges.