Two different Pakistan cricket teams lifted trophies on Sunday. The Pakistani national team completed a 3-0 sweep of the West Indies in Abu Dhabi, while in the Indian Cricket League, the Lahore Badshahs (ostensibly the ICL’s Pakistan team) won the best of three finals against the Hyderabad Heroes in Ahmedabad.

The Pakistan-West Indies series was thoroughly absorbing, courtesy of some close finishes and the hurricane force of two Chris Gayle centuries. Many of the West Indies squad recently won $1 million each playing for the Stanford Superstars against England. Pakistan did well to emerge undefeated against a buoyant and confident team.

Lumbering from crisis to crisis over the past couple of years, Pakistan still somehow keeps its head above water. During the past year they have played 22 ODIs, winning 19 of them. There is no telling how good this team could be if its affairs were run better.

No team has been hit with as many defections to the ICL from international cricketers as Pakistan. The biggest of those losses was Mohammad Yousuf who just a few weeks ago signed with the ICL citing lack of respect for his seniority as a reason for jumping ship. He was named in Pakistan’s side for the series against the West Indies, only for the Pakistan Cricket Board to discover that he had left for India to play in the ICL.

As is the directive from India’s all-powerful cricket board which runs the bigger, swankier IPL, any player who signs with the ICL must be banned from playing for their national team. Ever loyal to the whims of its neighbour when it comes to cricketing concerns, Pakistan duly slapped a ban on Yousuf — by some distance Pakistan’s best batsman. The team trotted off to Abu Dhabi, while Yousuf was swiftly inducted into the Lahore Badshahs, joining the ranks of the disgruntled and discarded.

The Lahore Badshahs swaggered around the ICL and were deservedly crowned the league’s champions. Much of the Badshahs success was due to the firepower of the opening pair of Imran Nazir and Imran Farhat. The two namesakes, both 26 years old, are a joy to watch in full flow — Farhat classier and more stylish; Nazir a virtual barbarian when things are going his way, as they did in Sunday’s final when he clubbed 111 off only 44 balls with 11 resounding sixes.

The Imrans have certainly had their chances with Pakistan, but neither was able to cement a place in the team. Once the PCB indicated a preference for the more polished but equally inconsistent Salman Butt at the top of the order, the two dashing openers threw their lot in with the ICL. One is left to wonder how good Pakistan would be if they could still call upon the services of the born-again Farhat and Nazir. Either one of them could partner Butt at the top of the order, with the other providing adequate backup and the necessary guard against complacency.

The noise coming out of Pakistan is that the ban against ICL players is under review though it is not likely that the ban will be lifted in the immediate future. Were Pakistan to bring back Nazir, Farhat and Yousuf, it is almost certain that India would not tour Pakistan in January. In a year where Pakistan played no Test cricket, all hopes are pinned on India’s impending visit and nothing will be done to jeopardize it. It will be a long winter before there is any thought of Pakistan welcoming back its prodigal sons.

This has been a bonanza year for all A R Rahman fans. The music maestro gave some catchy and foot-tapping music in films like Jodhaa Akbar, Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na and the soon to be released Yuvvraaj.

Before the year comes to a close Rahman will also unveil the musical score of Aamir Khan starrer Ghajini.

However it’s not just film compositions that has been keeping Rahman busy. The genius has also composed the theme song for the much awaited Champions League Twenty 20 cricket tournament.

This is for the first time that the music maestro has composed the theme song for any major sports tournament. The theme song doesn’t have any lyrics but only chants accompanied by Rahman’s foot-tapping composition.

That the Indian cricket board have changed the face of the game is indisputable. They have taken Twenty20 – a modest little English invention designed to help the first-class counties stave off bankruptcy – and transformed it into the mighty Indian Premier League, a must-have accoutrement for the world’s top players. Nobody quite knows where it will end.

Just how mighty the IPL has already become is underlined by the arrival of David Collier, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, in Mumbai for strained negotiations about England players’ involvement in the IPL. The presence of Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff next year is inevitable. The devil is in the detail.

But India’s influence might not stop at cricket. It could conceivably become a major battleground between sports bodies who increasingly want to maximise commercial revenue from their matches – as well as to have the disturbing ability to sanitise coverage – and traditional media outlets who believe that independent coverage is under threat.

If any sporting body can be the catalyst for change, recent history suggests it could be the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). If bcci.tv, which was launched ahead of the India-Australia Test series six weeks ago to a lukewarm response, makes an impact, then rest assured that English football’s Premier League, for one, will be among many official bodies who take note.

The BCCI have sold online rights to three official websites for $50m (£33m) over 10 years. As well as bcci.tv, a start-up company called Global Cricket Ventures now has the rights to the official IPL site (iplT20.com) and the official site for the Champions League (ChampionsLeague.com) – the new world club Twenty20 tournament that launches next month, with Middlesex, the English champions, as one of eight teams.

As yet Global Cricket Ventures does not have the rights to live internet coverage. The TV companies have been shrewd enough to protect their rights deals by buying up live internet streaming as well, purely as a defensive measure. They may not be allowed to do so for much longer.

What Global Cricket Ventures (a joint operation between Live Current Media and Netlink Blue Holding, which will be responsible for IT solutions) does have is the rights to web highlight packages, plus highlights for mobile phones and archive material from the date of the agreement.

The effects of this will fill many sports documentary makers – and, arguably, fans – with dread. In future, economic realities will dictate that much of Indian cricket’s history will be told through official channels. Totalitarian states would have approved, though whether viewers will want to watch ‘official’ coverage remains to be seen.

Sharad Pawar, the Indian agriculture minister, in one of his last acts as BCCI president, hailed online and mobile-phone coverage as an increasingly popular ’second-screen experience’, enabling users to call up action any time, anywhere. In future – and at the rate of technological advancement it could be sooner rather than later – it will become the ‘first-screen experience’ as the internet supersedes television.

But for now nobody, and least of all Global Cricket Ventures, knows whether they can make money out of it. What fills established media companies with dread, and has the Association of Newspaper Editors in the UK full of doom and gloom, is that attracting an internet audience is one thing, making money out of them quite another.

The internet user has come to expect something for nothing, and cricket is no different. When Wisden.com, a recognisable worldwide brand, made a leaden attempt to build a model based on subscriptions, it attracted fewer than 5,000 subscribers, even though it was backed at the time by the hugely successful CricInfo website, which now averages more than 8m different users a month. No one is sure whether Wisden’s failure was that of a traditional cricket brand fast becoming outdated, or whether it had illustrated an eternal internet truth.

The uncertainty is shown in the successful bid of $50m for 10 years, small change in the context of Indian cricket-rights deals. Sony and World Sports Group paid more than $1bn for 10 years of IPL television rights. ESPN Star splurged just under $1bn last month for 10 years of Champions League coverage. Two years ago, Nimbus Sports paid $612m for only four years of Indian Tests and one-day internationals.

As a comparison, the ECB did well to secure a new four-year deal worth £300m ($445m) from Sky and Five for their home Tests and ODIs. It sounded even more impressive before sterling crashed against the dollar. But no one has ever been tempted by the idea of internet highlights packages in Britain, so in the current economic climate, if you have a half-decent server and a spare couple of grand, the time might be ripe.

There is reason to suspect that sport may be about to undergo its biggest transformation since it blossomed with the expansion of the railways in the mid-1800s. And it is time that independent media groups – and ultimately the public – stopped sleepwalking into it.

Reuters, the international news agency, refused to cover India’s Test series against Australia last month because of contractual demands that threatened its right to disseminate information as it saw fit. Reuters have now boycotted Australia’s Test series against New Zealand starting this week, again because of attempts to prevent distribution of photographs to cricket websites. Christoph Pleitgen, Reuters’ head of global news, said it was a core issue of press freedom.

Now that newspapers have their own websites, they are shifting uneasily to join Reuters’ boycott.

CricInfo has endured this treatment for years. One of the most popular websites in the world is persistently refused accreditation by the BCCI because it does not fit in with their grand design. It has learned to scramble for accreditation where it can. Established newspapers, who feared CricInfo’s pioneering of free internet cricket news as much as the BCCI did, were not about to run to help. Had they done so, sports journalism in the independent, mainstream media might not be facing the threat that it is today.

It is still 40 days away, but the inaugural Champions League T20 tournament has already become a hit with cricket administrators and players all over the world giving a thumbs up to international cricket’s first-ever franchise driven club level tournament.

Cricketers, administrators hail Champions League T20

The Champions T20 League, a joint initiative of BCCI, Cricket South Africa and Cricket Australia, will see the best domestic T20 teams from India, Australia, South Africa, England and Pakistan fight it out in the USD six million tournament scheduled to be held in India from December 3 to 10.

“The Champions League is a culmination of hard work by BCCI, CA, CSA and we would like to have champions of champions. The Champions League is definitely going to become one of the the best of the best T20 tournaments. The Champions League will decide who the club level champion is,” Champions League Commissioner Lalit Modi said in a glittering draw and T20 Champions award ceremony at a city hotel here on Thursday.

Modi, who is also the brain behind the highly successful Indian Premier League, informed that in the first edition of the event eight teams from five countries will vie for top honours but the number of participating teams will subsequently increase in the next year.

“This is the inaugural edition of the Champions League and we are starting with eight teams from five countries. The total number of matches this year will be 15. But in year two, the number of teams will increase to 12. Subsequently the number of matches will shoot up to 23,” he said.

Its great to see teams from different countries participating in the tournament in the very first year,” he said. Modi, who is also the Commissioner of IPL, said although T20 cricket has attained great heights in terms of popularity, it will have no adverse affect on the traditional format of the game and limited overs cricket.

“The Champions League is here to stay and fans are loving it. At the same time, ODIs and Tests are also flourishing.”

Meanwhile, world cricketers also seemed gung ho about the inaugural Champions T20 League with Michael Hussey describing the event as an ‘exciting concept’.

“It (Champions T20 League) is an exciting concept as T20 has captured the imagination of the world. It is a fantastic concept and I am looking forward to be a part of it,” Hussey said.

Australia and Indian Premier League champions Rajasthan Royals all-rounder Shane Watson credited the IPL for revolutionising the concept of T20 cricket.

“The IPL really took that (T20 cricket) on. Its amazing to see best club teams from different countries fighting it out against each other,” he said.