India's billion-dollar Twenty20 revolution
In the Sunday Telegraph , Michael Atherton says that the Indian Premier League and Twenty20 cricket is poised to take over, so you better get used to it.
Martin Williamson
25-Feb-2013
In the Sunday Telegraph, Michael Atherton says that the Indian Premier League and Twenty20 cricket is poised to take over, so you better get used to it.
It was said after the Ashes victory of 2005 that cricket was the new football; well, the IPL is cricket's version of football's Premier League, and the consequences, in terms of the finances and structure of the world game, are likely to be far-reaching.
But Atherton warns that rather than complement the traditional game, the new formats and new cash might well swamp it.
Further down the line, English county cricket may find itself threatened and the ECB, by sanctioning the IPL, may not so much have kept the barbarians at the gates, as let them through the front door. If the franchise model expands, as is the hope in India, then there will be a limit to how far a market can serve two masters. Even in India, a much bigger market for cricket, there will be a potential conflict between the new and the old. No prizes for guessing where a young, hip Calcuttan businessman will want to spend his company's dosh - and it's not with the antiquated Bengal Cricket Association. Shah Rukh Khan's Kolkata Red Chillies has far more appeal.
With franchise owners having staked megabucks on the IPL, the Times of India's Indranil Basu crunches the numbers to find out whether the IPL model makes business sense.
Martin Williamson is executive editor of ESPNcricinfo and managing editor of ESPN Digital Media in Europe, the Middle East and Africa