Founder chairman and commissioner of the Indian Premier League (IPL), Lalit Modi is back star gazing. He sure knows a thing or two about marketing cricket and when he says players in the T20 league will earn one million dollars a match, one has to take him seriously.Had Modi continued for a couple of years, he would have taken IPL to a different level and players would be earning much more. A man who keeps in touch with the business of international sport, his comparisons of the English Premier League and major US leagues with IPL is something one has to sit up and take note of.
Seeing the growth of IPL, most other cricket-playing countries tried to replicate it but not with the same level of success. Importantly, no India player is permitted to play in any other overseas league. The IPL this year attracted expert commentators from all cricket-playing nations, most of them former captains. Add to it former cricketers, who have been roped in to commentate in six regional languages.
Recently, Shahid Afridi made a laughable statement as he is wont to, saying that the Pakistan Super League will be bigger than the IPL, even though he enjoyed his short stint with the Deccan Chargers in the inaugural edition. With Indians not playing, the world leagues are happy with Pakistani specialists in the shortest format. People thought IPL with Pakistanis would have been more exciting, but nobody seems to be missing them now.
With English players clamouring for a cut-off date for IPL, more of them can be seen in the competition once some concession is made. Only the Australians are free to play in the IPL, though Cricket Australia pulled out some of their fast bowlers ahead of an Ashes series.For the cricketing world, Virat Kohli is as big as Stephen Curry in professional basketball or any English Premier League or Spanish League stars. In India the following of NFL is not much, so those high figures are only counted in millions!
Curry, who plays for Golden State Warriors, heads a list of 27 highly paid NBA stars for the 2017-18 season of eight months with $34.7 million, followed by Cleveland Cavaliers’ Lebron James ($33.3m), Denver Nuggets’ Paul Millsap ($30.8m) in the $30m bracket. The least paid is Jonathan Clay ‘JJ’ Redick, whose package is $23m.If the top 27 stars in NBA get paid upwards of $23m, the IPL’s mascot Kohli takes home `17 crore for playing a little over a month-and-a-half or 14 matches, and it is as impressive when you say he is paid $2.5 million.
Can you take the names of Mahendra Singh Dhoni and young Rishabh Pant in the same breath? But the two wicketkeeper-batsmen get `15 crore ($2.2m) each and likewise Rohit Sharma, Ben Stokes, Sunil Narine and Axar Patel are paid `12.5 crore ($1.8 million) each. Then comes Jaydev Unadkat at `11.5 crore ($1.7 m). After him there are six players who log in `11 crore ($1.6 m). After them, there are 17 players perched happily at over $1 million.
Some former stars say the money pouring into IPL is ruining traditional cricket and Modi put it bluntly that Test cricket will soon become a four-day affair, taking a cue from the ICC which is even toying with the idea of dividing international cricket into two divisions.Afghanistan will make their Test debut against India in Bengaluru in June, but the two teams may not be playing another Test for at least four years, going by the proposed Future Tours Programme for 2019-2022. Ireland will play their first Test at home against Pakistan a month ahead of Afghanistan, from May 11-15.
The two Test debutants will give a clear indication whether the expanded Test circle can make cricket any more exciting. For the time being, two of its star players Rashid Khan and Mohammed Nabi (Both SunRisers Hyderabad), and exciting 17-year-old of-spinner Mujeeb Ur Rahman (Kings XI Punjab) and chinaman bowler Zaheer Khan Pakteen (Rajasthan Royals) are causing ripples in the IPL.
Will IPL decide the future of international cricket?(The writer is a veteran commentator and views expressed are personal. He can be reached at sveturi@gmail.com)