Top 5 players who will be missed during Champions League T20 2014

The Champions League Twenty20 (CL T20) is in its 6th season, and it would be fair to say that the tournament has not managed to gain the popularity that the organizers of the tournament would have initially hoped for.The first season of the CLT20, back in 2009, was probably the best ever tournament in terms of quality of cricket, with New South Wales and Trinidad & Tobago, in particular, playing some sparkling cricket right throughout the tournament. But the subsequent tournaments, unfortunately, haven’t been able to provide the same kind of spectacle.What is not going to help the CLT20’s cause, as far as this year’s tournament is concerned, is the fact that some of the most marquee T20 cricketers in the world won’t be taking part due to their team(s) not having qualified for the event.Here are 5 players whose presence will be sorely missed in this year’s CLT20:

#5 Dale Steyn

Although Dale Steyn will be remembered by posterity more for his exploits in Test match cricket, but there is no doubt that Steyn, at his best, is among the top T20 bowlers as well. He did have a poor 2014 IPL season, but it would be grossly unfair to judge his T20 ability on the basis of one tournament. You only have to look at the 2014 World T20, which took place shortly before the IPL, to see what Steyn is capable of when in form.

In a group stage encounter between South Africa and New Zealand, the Black Caps needed 7 runs off the last over for victory, with the well-set Ross Taylor and Luke Ronchi at the crease and 5 wickets in hand. Steyn, who was entrusted with the responsibility of bowling the last over, not only defended the target by conceding just 4 runs in an extremely high-pressure situation, but also prized out the wickets of Ronchi and Nathan McCullum in the process.

Buy Sachin Tendulkar’s auto-biography here - 31% off!

#4 David Warner

David Warner deserves tremendous credit for establishing himself as a regular for Australia across all formats of the game. He was pigeonholed as a T20 specialist earlier, but he has managed to translate his short-form success into Test cricket recently and has become a better all-round batsman.

Despite his accomplishments in Test cricket, though, Warner remains at his most destructive in T20 cricket, and it’s a real pity that he won’t be featuring in this year’s CLT20. It was Warner, after all, who lit up the 2011 edition of the tournament with back-to-back scores of 135* and 123* against CSK and RCB respectively, both of which will probably feature in the top 10 T20 innings played till date.

Buy Sachin Tendulkar’s auto-biography here - 31% off!

#3 Virat Kohli

Virat Kohli had a horrendous Test series in England – scoring just 134 runs in 5 Tests at an average of 13.40 – but there were signs that he was finding his way back to form towards the end of the limited overs series. With that being the case, Kohli would have hoped to get back into the thick of things immediately by playing in the CLT20 rather than pondering on his failures in England.

Kohli had shown during the recent World T20 in Bangladesh that he’s one of the best T20 batsmen in the world, and his presence in the upcoming CLT20 would have undoubtedly embellished the tournament.

Buy Sachin Tendulkar’s auto-biography here - 31% off!

#2 Chris Gayle

AB de Villiers might be the best batsman in the world today, but when it comes to T20 cricket exclusively, Chris Gayle remains the best in the world by a distance. Although Gayle had a substandard 2014 IPL season, which was one of the main reasons for RCB having a mediocre tournament, but the West Indian showed in the subsequent CPL T20 that he is far from finished as a T20 batsman.

What has made Gayle stand out from some of the other great T20 batsmen going around is his remarkable consistency: his averages in the IPL in 2011, 2012 and 2013 were 67.55, 61.08 and 59 respectively and in each of those seasons, he had a strike-rate exceeding 150.

Buy Sachin Tendulkar’s auto-biography here - 31% off!

#1 AB de Villiers

AB de Villiers, who is Virat Kohli’s teammate at Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), is arguably the best batsman in world cricket today as illustrated by the fact that he is one of only two batsmen to average more than 50 in both Test and ODI cricket presently. It’s a given, then, that de Villiers’ absence is a massive blow to the tournament.

He scored 395 runs from 14 matches at an average of 35.90 and a strike-rate of 158.63 for RCB in the IPL last season, but it wasn’t enough for RCB to reach the knock-out stages of the tournament and, thereby, qualify for the CL T20.

Buy Sachin Tendulkar’s auto-biography here - 31% off!