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The inaugural Twenty20 Champions League has veered from reality to fantasy and back several times in the 15 months or so since it was first proposed.

Finally though it will get under way on December 3 when Middlesex Crusaders take on the Victoria Bushrangers at Mumbai's Brabourne Stadium.

There, as if to encapsulate the fact that nothing is quite what it seems in the increasingly madcap world of modern cricket, Middlesex will be playing against, rather than with, one of the men who helped them qualify.

Pace bowler Dirk Nannes, a former World Cup skier, saxophone player and Japanese speaker, took the new ball in Middlesex's three-run win over Kent in July's Twenty20 Cup final at the Rose Bowl.

Yet next month, he will probably be doing likewise for his native Australian state side - or the Twenty20 version of it at least.

Another interesting character is set to be shouldering the seam-bowling duties for the Bushrangers, England and Nottinghamshire's Grimsby-born, Dandenong-raised Darren Pattinson.

For a player who found himself the unwitting eye of a storm on his Test debut at Headingley last summer, the Champions League may just present a welcome opportunity to remain out of the spotlight.

The high profile of team-mates and opponents should see to that, in a competition sure to play heavily on hype and publicity and with Rajasthan Royals coach Shane Warne unlikely to shy away from his responsibilities on that score.

Just imagine the pre-match bluster if Warne's IPL winners end up taking on his home state Victoria, captained by his fellow Aussie Test leg-spinner Cameron White, in the Chennai final on December 10.

Characterised by some of the early doubters as a mere bargaining tool as the Board of Control for Cricket in India sought to get the IPL off the ground, the Champions League was nonetheless a megabucks dream which lived on for all those who thought they might just qualify - even when the whole competition seemed to have slipped mysteriously off the agenda.

The IPL top brass never once suggested publicly there would be no Champions League, it was what they did not say which set tongues wagging.

An apparent reluctance to pinpoint a schedule did not help. That was finally overcome, only for the International Cricket Council to baulk at plans which threatened to take much-needed focus off their own under-fire Champions Trophy tournament.

In the end, that mini-World Cup never took place because of an ever-worsening security situation in Pakistan, but by then a Champions League rethink had settled on December.

All along, of course, muddying the waters many times over has been the IPL and the Indian board's spat with the Indian Cricket League.

Kapil Dev's tournament stole a march on the IPL because the former Indian captain announced its inception first.

The sub-continent was suddenly mobilised to an irresistible surge of interest in Twenty20, on the back of an India-Pakistan final in the first world final in South Africa, and Kapil's manoeuvre is one for which he seems destined never to be forgiven by some.

So much of what has happened in the past year appears to have been part of the principal aim - to obliterate ICL at all costs - and it was against that background that Kent captain Rob Key had to admit before the Twenty20 final that he had no idea if his team would be involved in the Champions League.

His doubts were over whether the ICL connections of some of Kent's players would count against them, and also whether the tournament would in fact take place as promised.

Ultimately, his qualms proved well-founded in the first instance if not the second, leaving Middlesex as England's only representatives next month.

The Crusaders, and their veteran captain Shaun Udal in particular, are a great story.

The occidental tourists of Antigua - they failed there to cope with Stanford Twenty20 kings Trinidad and Tobago last month - have a second chance to scoop a jackpot.Should they do so, it will be an astounding, defining even, epilogue to Udal's career, in which the off-spinner seemed sure for a decade or more not to add to a smattering of one-day international caps from his youth.

Instead, he made his Test debut approaching the age of 37 and having announced his retirement last year after a long association with his native Hampshire, at almost 40 he finds himself in with a shot at a pension beyond his wildest dreams.

Whoever pockets the champions' fortune, though, will surely be pinching themselves, not only at taking the opportunity of a lifetime but that despite all the intrigue, the 2008 IPL Champions League did actually happen after all.

Sporting Life / Eurosport