Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 1 March 2008

Money talks in Mumbai

issue 01 March 2008

With Shilpa Shetty, Lachlan Murdoch, Aussie feist-meister Andrew Symonds and more Indian billionaires than you can shake a stump at, the eye-watering player-auction for the new Twenty20 Indian Premier League (IPL) in Mumbai last week was never going to be something tailored for the Long Room at Lord’s. But this should be good for cricket, and very good for good cricketers. Money well spent you might say.

In case you missed it, some of the world’s best players were sold off to a new set of eight big-city franchises across India — Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Jaipur (where young Lachlan’s Emerging Media owns the team) among others — for mind-blowing sums that put cricket on to the same sort of scale as the Premier League or American Football. India’s one-day captain and keeper M.S. Dhoni has gone (to Chennai) for £770,000 — that’s per year, for three years, for the six weeks of the League from mid-April to June.

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