IPL done, players can now skip India duties

Why don’t cricketers get exhausted by playing in the IPL and travelling across the country in the Indian summer? And why do they, then, take a break when the Indian national team is playing? This is the essence of comments made by the former India captain, Sunil Gavaskar.

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“I do not agree with this concept of players resting… You don’t take rest during IPL, then why ask for it while playing for India?” he said on a TV show.

Gavaskar knows perfectly well why the players rest during India’s tours but not during the IPL. The reason can be summarised in one word: money. The IPL pays cricketers significantly more than they get paid for playing for India. For instance, Rishabh Pant’s IPL contract is worth Rs 16 crore annually — that’s Rs 11 crore more than his current India contract. The math heavily favours the IPL, and that’s the reason players don’t want to miss it. Skipping a few Tests or ODIs for India isn’t a big monetary loss — say, Rs 30 lakh for five ODIs missed.

Skipping an India tour and playing in the IPL is distasteful to Gavaskar, but there’s a very honourable precedent for this: In 2011, Sachin Tendulkar preferred to play in the IPL right after victory in the 50-over World Cup — and then skipped India’s Test tour of the West Indies. He wanted to rest. And what’s good for Tendulkar should be good for Pant, right? After all, the game and the country are bigger than an individual, aren’t they?

Pant is among the players who have been rested for the ODI tour of the West Indies. The others are Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah, Hardik Pandya and Dinesh Karthik. It’s probably true that they’re jaded with non-stop cricket and touring and desperately need rest — but the exhaustion and yearning for home were caused by the IPL, which started on March 26 and ended on May 29.

More of it!

Cricket nationalism can be nasty business, promoting jingoism and loathing. Sport at the club level fosters internationalism. The IPL clearly builds bridges among cricketers from across the world — this is good, though this idea conflicts with the waves of nationalism sweeping across India.

The trouble is that T20 cricket is the most facile, insignificant and least-respected format of cricket — the respect it gets from enthusiastic commentators such as Gavaskar is due to the money. To pay cricketers more for T20 cricket than Test cricket is to undermine Test cricket. Sachin Tendulkar has argued that Test players should be paid more than T20 players.

Two months ago, Yuvraj Singh said: “Why would someone play five-day cricket and get Rs 5 lakh and not play T20 cricket and get Rs 50 lakh? Players who have not made it to international cricket are getting Rs 7-10 crores.”

Even if you’re Rohit Sharma or Kohli, the ardour for the Tests can cool if you’re 35 and out of form and there is a relatively easy Rs 20 crore to be made from the IPL, with more to come later from mentoring and commentary?

Man who changed cricket

In a wonderful short story, The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, Mark Twain showed that honesty that has not passed the test of temptation is no honesty. Though Lalit Modi can’t be called the man who corrupted Indian cricket, he is certainly the man who began to mine the unsuspected billions Indian cricket was sitting on.

Modi’s life can be the subject of a biopic. He was born in a wealthy business family, perhaps spoilt by privilege, and was convicted for drug possession and assault as a student in USA. He got into many business ventures, including lottery in the Northeast, but didn’t get anywhere. Then he got into cricket administration, through the backdoor — into the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association after making a donation, into the Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA) as a ‘Lalit Kumar’, because the ruling dispensation wouldn’t have let him become a member. Proximity to Vasundhara Raje, who became CM of Rajasthan in 2003, paid off — the government promulgated the Rajasthan Sports Ordinance, RCA’s voting criteria were changed, and Modi became its president.

After the IPL was launched, its blueprint copy-pasted from the ICL, with him as its chairman and commissioner, he became larger than life — Jaipur was abuzz with stories about his arrogance with even top government officials. He was called the ‘Super CM’ and influenced government policy. Farmers who’d lost their land due to change in policies hated him; priests whose families had been living for generations in dwellings close to the Amer Fort hated him — they faced eviction as Modi’s wife wanted to develop the property as a ‘heritage hotel’. Bureaucrats and police officers feared and despised him. The clamour against him got louder and became a factor in Vasundhara’s defeat in 2008, even as the BJP distanced itself from him.

Modi fled India in 2010 after being accused of misconduct and financial irregularities. The cricket board suspended him. The Enforcement Directorate wanted to question him, but he never returned, citing a threat to his life in India.

He rejoiced when the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014 — he counted Vasundhara and Sushma Swaraj among friends. But the cases against him weren’t closed, and in bitterness, he revealed in 2015 that Vasundhara and Sushma helped him in obtaining residency or travel documents while he was a fugitive from law in India.

The Modi story has everything — crime, failure, pride, greed, fall, grandeur, tragedy. It shows our elite — the politicians and businesspeople — in a very poor light.

The story has now taken a new turn with the entry, as love interest, of Sushmita Sen. That’s another twist in the story of a businessman who seems to be on an endless vacation.