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. Do the math, as they say. Biggest priced non-Indian was Symonds (Hyderabad) at about £650,000. His captain Ricky Ponting went for a fraction of that. Ponts (Kolkata) of course has had a good laugh about that. Ha ha! I’m not sure it will be quite so chucklesome when they’re both playing for Australia again. And fellow-Aussie David Hussey (eh?) went for more than his much better-known Test playing brother Michael. Well, serves him right for having such an annoying nickname as ‘Mister Cricket’.
So what’s not to like? There are faint twitterings that this will mean the end of Test cricket. Oh please. Whenever there’s a controversy in sport, the answer is almost invariably television. So Twenty20 is perfect for TV: short, highly sponsored, and a big audience.
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