Whether you like it or not, like Sky’s Grand Slam Sunday or the NFL’s Monday Night Football, the Indian Premier League is here to stay. There may be some teething trouble – you really don’t want the floodlights going off for half an hour at the most famous of your eight venues – but a spectacular opening ceremony and capacity crowds at nearly every venue suggest that Indian cricket fans will embrace the club culture after all. The galaxy of luminaries that Lalit Modi envisaged is certainly shining bright, with the likes of Michael Hussey, Brendon McCullum, Virender Sehwag, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath taking turns to sprinkle the audience with stardust.
The challenge that confronts the game’s administrators now is a 13th Labour of Hercules. Unlike Modi, many of them are fossils who would have been at home in Lord Hawke’s times. But for better or worse, they have now ensured that international cricket doesn’t become secondary and second rate, like international football outside of the World Cup and continental championships. It seems an onerous task, given how the world, and especially India, has embraced Twenty20, but it can be done.
To begin with, a window for the IPL can’t come soon enough. Forget the Future Tours Programme, forget the county championship, forget every other competition where the jingle-jangle of money isn’t following you. If the ECB and other boards don’t fall into line, the likes of Kevin Pietersen will simply go ahead and do their own thing. In a free-market world, you wouldn’t blame him either, not when he can make more than his annual contract for six weeks of calculated slogging.
Read full article by Dileep Premchandran: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/04/23/how_to_save_cricket_from_being.html
No related posts.