It has been widely reported in the last couple of days that Kevin Pietersen is likely to 'bought' in the IPL auction for a record fee, eclipsing the $1.5 million paid for the services of Indian wicketkeeper MS Dhoni in last year's inaugural auction. The Indian Premier League, a competition of Twenty20 cricket between 8 franchised teams in India, runs for a six-week period in April/May every year. Players are auctioned off before the tournament to the highest bidding franchise.
The IPL is backed by a variety of multi-millionaire Indians and has seen unprecedented amounts of money pumped into it. For six weeks work, some of the players can earn more money than they would have previously earned in six years.
It is not difficult to understand, then, why every top cricketer in the world wants to play in this competition. Even those commentators of a purist view concede that the players cannot be blamed for wanting to play in the IPL. Twenty20 cricket is undoubtedly exciting and attracts bigger crowds and television audiences than Test cricket. It is also more attractive to advertisers, who will pay more money for adverts during the games.
Indeed, there are many winners in this new era of Twenty20 cricket. Obviously, all of the players involved are earning the kind of money never before seen in cricket. The organisers are very happy with their attractive product; the advertisers are delighted to be associated with it. And with high viewing figures, everyone seems to be a winner.
There is at least one high profile loser: English cricket. English cricket's soul will be sold off next week in the IPL auction.
And while it is being sold, the England cricket team will be half way through the First Test against the West Indies in Jamaica. Are the players minds going to be 100% on the game as the tough arena of Test cricket requires? Or are the top England players going to be desperate to get off the field to ring their agent and find out who they will be playing for in India, and more importantly, for how much?
The ECB gave in to the demands of both the IPL top brass and England players by releasing them to play for three weeks of the six-week IPL tournament, instead of the originally proposed two-week release. The result of this, is that the players who do play, certainly Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, and possibly a few others, will arrive back from three weeks of Twenty20 crash-bang-wallop with only 5 days until the first Test match of the summer, again against the West Indies. It is not exactly good preparation for a summer which includes the highly-anticipated Ashes.
The IPL is changing the face of cricket and hence affecting every country in the Test arena. But the effects are far more acute in England because the IPL runs at the start of our cricket season. No other nation has this problem, indeed many others, including Australia and South Africa, are just winding down their seasons in April, so the IPL is in a perfect window. Not for us though.
Twenty20 cricket will march on in the coming years, especially in the form of the rival Premier League in England, which is to be bankrolled by Texan billionaire Sir Allen Stanford. But cricket tours of 4 or 5 Tests with ample preparation time for both teams is likely to be a thing of the past. In England's case, the future is likely to be a few Twenty20 slogs in preparation for five-day game. RIP English cricket.
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