Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff hit the headlines again this morning, but unfortunately not for their performances in the First Test against the West Indies in Jamaica. Both have fetched approximately £1.1 million each in the second Indian Premier League auction in Goa. But what exactly does this mean?
The India Premier League will run for six weeks in April/May. It is a Twenty20 tournament of 8 franchised teams, which are based in cities like Delhi and Mumbai. Therefore all players remain on contracts at the home clubs, in England or South Africa or Australia for instance, but their services are bought for the duration of the tournament, for a certain number of years. The players are auctioned to the highest bidder, but each franchise has a budget. Most players were auctioned last year, on contracts of more than one year. With a limit of ten foreign (non-Indian) players per squad, most franchises already had seven or eight such players.
Therefore, all the attention was on Freddie and KP, because no franchise was likely to take on a foreign player unless he was a world class player. However, the pair can only play for three weeks of the six-week tournament, so they only earn half of the auction fee: about £550,000. That is still over £180,000 a week; eat your heart out Robinho. However, because the players are released from their central contract with the England Cricket Board for those three weeks, they are technically contracted to their respective counties- Lancashire and Hampshire respectively- for that time. And the counties want compensation.
The compensation was set at 10% of their fee, which for Flintoff and Pietersen is £55,000 each. Not bad for missing one County Championship match. Paul Collingwood, the other centrally contracted England player, was bought for $275,000, so Durham can expect about £15,000. Collingwood was not the third most expensive England player though. All-rounder Ravi Bopara fetched $450,000. These are massive sums, so one can understand the English players scrambling to be part of it.
The IPL was exciting last year, and will undoubtedly be enhanced by Flintoff and Pietersen, as well as South African JP Duminy who has had a superb recent series against Australia and was auctioned for just shy of $1,000,000. What is more in doubt, is the preparedness of England's two best players for the First Test against the West Indies at Lords in May, after bashing the ball around in a Twenty20 tournament for three weeks. Is five days is long enough to get back into Test mode or does it not matter when you bat like Kevin Pietersen or Andrew Flintoff? Only time will tell.
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