By some coincidence of timing, I was in London on the evening of the European Champions League final. The match was held in Moscow but because the two finalists were English Premier League teams — Manchester United and Chelsea — it felt like it was being played in England.
Watching United play Chelsea on TV, I thought of the parallels between our very own IPL and the Premiership on which many of the IPL’s salient features are based.
I reckon it’s only a matter of time before all cricket — other than at the national team level — respects only one loyalty: to the best paymaster.
Something like 60 per cent of all players in the Premier League are not eligible to play for England; in other words, they are foreign players, hired at great expense by English clubs. There was a time, not so long ago, when football clubs were the quintessential expression of English identity. Now they have more in common with the United Nations.
But why single out the players? Over a decade ago, when the Australian/American Rupert Murdoch tried to buy United, hardcore fans revolted. Now, the club has welcomed American investment. Chelsea used to be owned by a colourful rogue called Ken Bates. Now, it is owned by Roman Abramovich.
The same is true of many, many other clubs. The most bizarre purchase of recent times has to be the deal which saw former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra buy Manchester City.
The IPL is getting to that stage. The foreign players are already here: how strange is it that Shane Warne should be captain of Rajasthan? I’m not sure we’ll ever get to the Premiership’s ratio of 62 per cent foreigners — India has more excellent cricketers than Britain has good football players — but, all over the cricket world, foreign players are dying to play for the IPL because the money is so good. I suspect that the notion of a truly local team is now dead. It may survive for the Ranji Trophy but fewer and fewer people will watch those games.
There will be holdouts, of course. Dimitri Mascarenhas, the England player who is captain of the Hampshire cricket team, has been desperate to play in the IPL. He was in India for a fortnight, but the IPL’s limit of four foreign players in the eleven, meant that he played in only one match. The Rajasthan Royals have played well. Hampshire, on the other hand, has played dismally.
Naturally, Mascarenhas wants to come back to India to play in the IPL semi-finals and (if the Royals make it) the finals. But Hampshire is refusing to let him go. Said the cricket club’s chairman: “Dimitri’s loyalties should be with us now.”
But should they? Thanks to the IPL, cricket is about to undergo a globalised blurring of loyalties in the same way that football has. It’s not that new a phenomenon, of course. There have always been foreign players in county cricket (I assume Shoaib Akhtar picked up that semi-intelligible accent while playing for Glamorgan). But the money that the IPL pays is so huge that county cricket cannot compete.
I reckon it’s only a matter of time before all cricket — other than at the national team level — respects only one loyalty: to the best paymaster.
I do not think that this is necessarily a bad thing. Even in our own Ranji Trophy matches, players have moved around so that they can make it to state teams — why should Rohan Gavaskar have played for Bengal? — so why not extend this principle at the global level?