Indian Premier League a worry for Australians.

by Major Wedgie

With most of Australia's cricket champions signing up to the Indian Premier League, Australian's are getting worried.

The Indian Premier League is a new Twenty20 cricket competition starting in India, in April this year (2008). The competition featuring 8 teams is well funded and is attracting corporate dollars, each team is being called a franchise.

Some commentators fear that the added matches will create player burnout. Whilst the league only runs for six weeks some fear that the league will grow and grow and "eat" into the regular international cricket year. Channel 10 in Australia have done a deal to deliver coverage of the "IPL" into Australian homes. A person said to me the other day "Just look at American basketballers, those guys don't want to play in the olympics for loss of income".

So is it all much ado about nothing? Well the answer to that may depend on how you look at it. If you treat it on face value there are some startling facts. Players playing in the IPL will make more money in the 44 days of competition than the rest of the year combined. This is true for every year including Ashes years and World cup years.

It may be inevitable that cricket follows in the footsteps of other big corporate sports. Not all sports are as exciting and action packed as Twenty20 cricket, but some have more corporate dollars and the question will remain "Does dollars screw up a sport?"

The other analogy that can be drawn here is between India's Twenty20 competition and Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket which set the foundation for the way One day cricket is still played today. Both leagues were characterized with back room deals and use of money to get the league started. World Series cricket was running financial losses within two years and eventually it was forced to do a deal with the cricket establishment to bring cricket back into the black.

The answer is wait and see, but my money is on the IPL having to come back to world cricket with some compromises to get the IPL format to work. It'll take a couple of years for the thing to settle though.