Cricket's Deal with the Devil

Among the most cherished of my boyhood memories is lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, tuned in to radio commentary of Ashes Test matches from England. On the other side of the room, my older brother would be listening, too, though his love of the game led him a further step: he would diligently record all the batsmen's scores and bowlers' figures in a little book offered for just that purpose by the Australian broadcaster. For two Sydney boys with cricket in their blood, this was about as good as it got.

How does that memory fit with what happened this week in a luxury Mumbai hotel, where 76 of the world's best cricketers were auctioned off to eight Indian franchises? The answer is that it does not fit at all.

The franchises, whose co-owners include Lachlan Murdoch and Bollywood actress Preity Zinta, will compete in the newly-conceived Indian Premier League, which is ostensibly owned by Indian cricket's governing body. Sony Television has paid around $1 billion for the exclusive rights to televise 10 years of IPL tournaments, the first of which starts April 18 and goes for six weeks. While it's probably advisable at least to try not to sound like a self-righteous fuddy-duddy when examining this enterprise, it's all but impossible for anyone with the faintest appreciation of cricket's traditions not to be deeply concerned by it.

IPL matches will be Twenty20, the newest, most helter-skelter and meaningless form of the game. There's a place for Twenty20 on the cricket calendar. A lot of people love it, which is one reason cricket authorities have resisted giving them too much of it. For 130 years, the pinnacle of cricket has been the Test match, a five-day examination of skill and nerve. It can be dull at times: even after 30 hours' play the result is occasionally a draw. But it's cricket's best and brightest jewel. Since the 1970s, the sport's guardians have fed the cricket-lite one-day version of the game to its more fickle fans, but it's positively stately compared to Twenty20. The danger of Twenty20's spread is that, some day, few fans will have the patience for anything else, and cricket will have been turned into just another soulless piece of mass entertainment.

People, in this case cricketers, taking wads of money when it's on offer is nothing new. But more than a few of the players who've signed up for the IPL have complained recently about being worn out by too much cricket. For now, IPL contracts stipulate that national duties will take precedence over the domestic tournament. But how long before some players, particularly those nearing the end of their careers, decide they'd be better off switching to the IPL or some other similar circus that could spring up before long? Already, the Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds — snared by Hyderabad for $1.35 million over three years — has indicated he'd rather play in the upcoming IPL tournament than tour an unstable Pakistan as part of his national squad.

Cricket lovers should prepare to be saddened by the sight of the two former champions Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, recently farewelled with much fanfare from Test cricket, creaking about in the IPL. Apart from a hefty pay cheque, what could these matches mean to the non-Indian players? What Australian, South African or New Zealander grows up dreaming of representing Jaipur, Mohali or Kolkata? The franchises comprise a hotchpotch of current and retired players from various countries. On what will the players draw to find the will to try their hardest? Gratitude, perhaps, for being paid so well? It was only a few years ago that cricket learnt a hard lesson — players engaged in matches of which the result scarcely matters to them are vulnerable to the charms of bookmakers. In this latest unseemly grab for cash, that lesson appears to have been forgotten already.