ICL and posterity

When Mohammad Yousuf signed up for the ICL, I felt a stirring of anticipation. Every other signee was a has-been or a never-will-be. But Yousuf was different. He was Test cricket's best batsman last year, he has years left in the game, and if someone like him was willing to take the risk, maybe there was something to Zee's league after all.

But keen though I am to see a commercial league for cricket in India, I don't see Zee delivering it. They don't have the grounds (though that's not an insuperable problem) and, more importantly, they don't seem to have the attention of India's current players. No one in India is going to turn on their sets to watch Andrew Hall bowl to Rohan Gavaskar. Anand Vasu's excellent survey in Tehelka of all the obstacles that made Zee's league a long-shot, ought to make Kapil Dev and Subhash Chandra nervous.

However, Zee's proprietor has always maintained that his scheme isn't payback for the TV rights the BCCI didn't sell him, but a pioneering scheme for improving the lot of the Indian cricketer, a token of Chandra's commitment to the greater good of Indian cricket. History might bear him out—though not, perhaps, in the way he meant.

The historical significance of Zee's league is that it has goosed the BCCI into announcing the Indian Premier League, a Twenty20 competition. Like the ICL the IPL will be made up of clubs operating franchises, in this case, sold by the BCCI.

If this happens it'll be the most important re-structuring of Indian cricket since the abolition of the Pentangular (made up of teams based on religion and ethnicity) and the institution of the Ranji Trophy (which instituted the territorial principle in domestic first-class cricket). In fact this is so important that it is hard to believe that the coterie of politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who run the BCCI have thought through the implications of their move.

If companies invest in franchises, if they pay large sums of money for the the privilege of participating, if they spend millions buying and selling players, they will want a share of the gate money and the television revenue that the league generates. The BCCI has already announced that they have foreseen this and franchises will be given their share. Which begs the crucial question: why would the franchisees in the long term leave the running of the league to a bunch of shamateur administrators voted in via shambolic elections who have no money invested in the league's success or failure? The BCCI seems to believe that it can privatize the game while keeping its honorary featherbeds intact. I don't think it can.

If the IPL works in its first two seasons, the pressure to franchise other forms of the game will be pretty much irresistible. Fifteen years ago the idea that a first-class cricket team ought to represent a franchise rather than territorial belonging would have appalled Indians. But the example of live league football beamed in from Europe has persuaded many of us that teams can generate excitement and loyalty without being tethered to the principle of territorial representation. Once a cricket competition based on franchises succeeds, I predict there will be no resistance to renaming Mumbai's Ranji trophy team, the Bombay Banshees. Maybe there'd be more than one Bombay first-class club team given the richness of its cricket culture. The Worli Whirlwinds, perhaps, or (why not) the Colaba Clubmen?

The prospect of India hosting cosmopolitan cricket leagues for Twenty20, ODI and First-Class cricket, run in a business-like way, with decent ground facilities and players from anywhere—Kenya, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, the West Indies—would so tickle the fancy (and vanity) of Indian audiences that I'm certain that the system would have a sporting chance of making money. If it did, the cannier members of Indian cricket's bureaucracy would see the writing on the wall and make their peace with the club barons by inviting them into the boardroom of what once used to be the BCCI.

And Mr Subhash Chandra would not only have the opportunity to bid for television rights all over again, he would have the priceless satisfaction of knowing that he, out of his disinterested concern for Indian cricket, was responsible for the revolution. That, surely, would be its own reward.