'Who told you to win in four days?'
Television personality Rajdeep Sardesai recalls how his father Dilip Sardesai was paid Rs 150 for his first Test in 1961
Nishi Narayanan
25-Feb-2013
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Television personality Rajdeep Sardesai recalls how his father Dilip Sardesai was paid Rs 150 for his first Test in 1961. Writing in the Hindustan Times he compares salaries of those days with what the Indian Premier League has to offer:
Cricket has always been burdened by a myth: unlike other competitive sports, we were told, cricket and the men who played the game were doing it for the ‘love’ of the sport. So while footballers were being transferred by clubs for millions of dollars, golfers and racing car drivers were millionaires, cricketers were expected to be amateurs playing a sport for the sheer joy of it. In India, this meant that you were employed in a 9 to 5 job by a public sector bank or through the ‘charity’ of a benevolent business house like the Tatas, even while you sweated it out on the field. Wearing the India cap made the size of your bank balance irrelevant. A Vinoo Mankad was actually dropped from the Indian team for a tour of England in 1952 because he had the ‘temerity’ to try and earn a living by playing professional cricket for a Lancashire club.
In the same paper Pradeep Magazine asks if cricket in India has entered an age of sponsored gambling.
The editors at the Hindu warn that the fears of Twenty20 cannibalising the classical Test format and IPL compounding player burnout are real. The most optimistic view of the IPL, according to them, is of it as a means of induction and culling:
Young cricketers yet to make the grade benefit from competing against the world’s best while those on their last legs refrain from unnecessarily prolonging their international careers.
Nishi Narayanan is a staff writer at ESPNcricinfo