There are many shades of Faf Du Plessis and each just as compelling as the other. You’ve seen him as the remarkable white ball player. You’ve admired him as the former captain of the Proteas men’s unit. You’ve admired his agility and lightening fast reflexes on the field. You’ve been in love with his batting, where he hits, rather carves big hits to the fence, being an ace crowd puller no matter what he scores and where he scores around the world. In all that he does, he is spectacular, bold but one who doesn’t make a noise and someone who knows how to turn up the heat! Now, prepare for a new avatar- presenting Faf du Plessis as the co owner of a brand new franchise in a new T20 league: the European T20 Premier League aka the ETPL!

The constant growth of league based T20 competitions 

Now as cricket fever continues to grip much of the world’s attention toward its charm and fascinating magic, one finds newer and newer T20 leagues mushrooming around the world. It could be said what started out in India, cricket’s bustling world as the IPL and grew in Australia further as the Big Bash League and would soon spread to the party land called the Caribbean in the form of the CPL is now going to unfurl a brand new avatar of sorts in the form of the ETPL and one of the team’s being co owned in that particular league is by Francois Faf du Plessis.

Faf is the co owner of the Rotterdam team, along with his good friends Jonty Rhodes and Heinrich Klaasen.  

And very recently, he was asked about his new role and by when could the league in which he owns the Rotterdam team become famous. To this, Faf, who was seen most recently as the expert commentator in the ongoing season of the IPL, provided a measured response.

The famous right handed batter said the following

You cannot compare any of the leagues around the world to the IPL in terms of its size, what it's done, the business side of it. I mean, a billion people in India-there's just no way. So park the IPL in its own conversation, in its own sentence," he says.

"And then you have the rest of the leagues around the world, where you're trying to find—how can you get your own depth of pool of players bigger? How can you create a game for the country to grow it? And there's a level of that in every country that I've seen happen amazingly. I've been playing cricket in South Africa, for instance, and for a long period of time, we have had domestic structures in place. But it's only the last three years when SA20 has come in and been run properly and engaged the fans properly that we've seen the whole country almost uplifted because of the success of the tournament," he added.

Faf du Plessis’s response is a quietly intelligent one and also blends his optimistic cricketing perspective with a sense of realism or practicality that leagues can’t be compared to each other. There’s little chance that the ETPL could soon become the go to premier franchise league such as the IPL but as more and more counties in Europe become interested in the game, it will not only open new doors for talents but also further elevate the status of the sport in its current most trending spectacle- the T20 format!