Opening a Pandora's Box

On Thursday England's new football coach, Fabio Capello, unveiled his squad for next week's friendly international against Switzerland. David Beckham aside, it was an unremarkable announcement ahead of an unremarkable contest. After all, friendly internationals are about as appetising as seven-match ODI series.

Of far greater consequence are the weekend rounds of Premier League fixtures that sandwich the England match. Today Manchester United take on Tottenham; next week Liverpool take on Chelsea. For as long as most fans can remember, and certainly since the domestic game was converted into a multi-million pound cash-cow in 1992-93, club has held complete sway over country.

For more than 100 years, the exact opposite has been true of cricket, but all that might be about to change. In the same week that England's cricketers ambled off to New Zealand for what promises to be their sleepiest engagement in many a month, the Indian Premier League (IPL) exploded into life. In an extraordinary bidding war, eight city-based franchises were auctioned off by the BCCI. By the time the biggest names in Indian business and Bollywood had finished fighting for their slice of the pie, the board had raked in a cool $723.59 million - almost double the initial estimate.

On top of that, the BCCI will be receiving more than $1 billion from Sony Television and the Singapore-based World Sports Group for ten years of TV rights. To put that into some sort of context, in 2000, Rupert Murdoch's Global Cricket Corporation paid half that amount for seven years of rights to the ICC's World Cup and Champions' Trophy events. Make no mistake, this tournament is going to be a success come what may. Money of that magnitude doesn't just talk, it bellows.

And the global game is going to be deafened by the decibels. How can it not be? Last week, Neil Davidson, the chairman of Leicestershire, took a swipe at the perceived financial imbalance between the haves and have-nots of English county cricket, complaining, apparently without irony: "The ECB has turned our first-class cricket into a football-style 'money game'."

He can but dream. In 2006 the combined income of the 18 English counties was £78 million, which only just exceeds the $111.9 million (£56 million) that Reliance India Ltd has just shelled out for the blue-chip Mumbai franchise. Admittedly that figure is spread across ten years, not one, but each IPL season consists of 44 three-hour days; each county season, six months of hard yakka. If cricket really is the new football, as was first claimed after the 2005 Ashes, then Leicestershire are more Dagenham & Redbridge than Derby. Their 2006 income was £2.8 million, more than half of which was a direct grant from the ECB.

The IPL gets underway in April, and then, in October, lurks the honey-trap of the Twenty20 Champions League, an invitational tournament for the best teams from India, Australia, South Africa and England. A prize pool of $5 million has been announced, and the winner alone will walk away with $2 million, which is twice what Australia earned for their unbeaten defence of the 2007 World Cup. If that volume of money doesn't spring Pandora's Box wide open, nothing will.

Cricket has been here before, and so it knows full well that resistance is futile. In 1977, Kerry Packer transformed the game for ever - and yes, arguably for better - when he broke the game's ancient and outdated pay structures with his World Series revolution. Then, as now, the only objective was power. Splashing the cash was not an act of largesse, it was an act of war - and that's a tactic that the BCCI has perfected in recent months, as confirmed by the recent furore in Australia. The Indian board has owned the game for years, but now, thanks to the stratospheric popularity of Twenty20 cricket, it has found the means to shape it in its own image.

Just as with Packer, some good could come of the upheaval - at the very least, it will spell an end to all the pretence. There's too much dysfunction in world cricket today, and most of that stems from the ineptitude of the ICC, which is more of a scapegoat than a governing body. It seems to exist primarily as a means for India to distance itself from decisions it doesn't want to take, or be seen to be taking. The IPL, on the other hand, is an all-Indian venture, and the accountability that entails will have to breed responsibility.

Responsibility for what, though? Packer once scoffed at a journalist's suggestion that his motives were "half-philanthropic", and Lalit Modi and his cohorts would doubtless indulge in a similarly stifled giggle. They'll have no qualms about crushing India's existing, and unloved, domestic associations - like Mumbai's property developers, they recognise the real-estate value, and find the slum-dwellers a nuisance - and likewise, those teams in the lower reaches of the international spectrum could find themselves being squeezed for money, players, and ultimately opponents.

The IPL will have no qualms about crushing India's existing, and unloved, domestic associations - like Mumbai's property developers, they recognise the real-estate value, and find the slum-dwellers a nuisance  

New Zealand, in particular, are already feeling the pinch. Earlier this month, Shane Bond sized up his career prospects and threw in his lot with the Indian Cricket League, the unofficial and less lucrative version of the IPL. His contract was terminated by NZC on the very day that England arrived for their one-day series, because of "perceived risks to future revenue streams". In other words, NZC were petrified that the Indian board would cut them off without a penny for allowing this signing to happen.

The BCCI has been ruthless towards ICL signees, even going so far as to bar three young Hyderabad cricketers from playing in corporate tournaments that could lead to job offers. It is determined the IPL will be the only league that counts, and it already has on its books a list of 78 cricketers from all over the world, who will be available to the various franchises in a US-style draft system.

The retired Shane Warne, at $400,000, is the prize pick, although the rest of the names are a who's who of the current international game, from Ricky Ponting to Kumar Sangakkara. At present there are no England players on that list, because the tournament clashes with their domestic season, and besides, they are among the better paid in the world game already. But there's been little secret about the IPL's interest in Andrew Flintoff. If his latest ankle operation can't solve his long-term problem, he knows where he'd be welcome.

Assumptions may be dangerous, but it is still safe to assume that IPL will be a success. The franchise structure is a step into the unknown, but Twenty20 cricket is a sure enough bet to justify it. The format has been a roaring success in every single country in which it has been played, guaranteeing domestic full houses in South Africa, Pakistan, and even England, where such a thing hasn't happened since Surrey ruled the roost in the 1950s.

Expansion of the format will surely follow, but South Africa's board is impoverished, as are those of Pakistan, West Indies and Sri Lanka. It's not the ideal position from which to negotiate, especially when your key assets are acting as free agents. It's somehow easier to imagine lucrative franchises emerging in Singapore and Hong Kong than Colombo and Kingston.

The big showdown will arise as and when the IPL clashes with a scheduled international tournament. If football's club v country tussle is anything to go by, then there can be only one winner. And yet, the sparks that flew during the recent India-Australia Test series, and the 84,000 spectators who packed the MCG for Friday's Twenty20, reiterate the fact that - just as in football - when an international fixture really matters to the participants and spectators alike, no sport on earth can compete. The trouble is, as England are about to discover in the echoingly empty New Zealand grounds, there are simply too few drawcards left in the world today.