World Cricket Premier Leagues?

With some trepidation, I would contend that the recent Indian Premier League has been a success, at least by degrees, if nothing else.

Take these indications as justification: good to exceptional crowd sizes at games. Regular acticles in newspapers and other media in Australia. The candour of the players involved. The way some elements have entered popular culture (i.e., the joke about Andrew Symonds returning Veredah Sehwag's call to the number 464 646...)

With this in mind, I put it that one of many possible outcomes is foreseeable. This is just one of many possible outcomes given that the influence of the new form of the game is yet to be fully realised. But in this scenario, players are increasingly dissillusioned with playing for their country, given that they can earn more money in a 6 week window of slap-and-dash rather than spending 75% of an entire year on tour.

The upshot of this is that players will no longer play cricket for their country; as dishonourable as that may seem, playing for one's country simpy doesn't have the financial clout to pull the talent (more about that mindset of the players later...)

So can a happy medium be found? I suggest that the only way the two can co-exist is to enter an international-football-type arrangement, albiet in a slightly different form.

We have to suppose for a minute that the moneyed Indian Premier League could possibly spawn similar contests, and that such contests would understandably have the market power to determine a players playing career, above and beyond country, even to the point of denying them from playing for their country should they be injured or other wise made unavailable.

Now given that it is unlikely that a Premier League-type contest could go on for more than 6 weeks at a time and still hold the publics attention, and given the unlikelyhood of having successful Premier Leagues concurrently underway across the planet, due to the competitive, market-driven mechanism of allocating limited resources, and given the flacidity of the ICC to effectively govern the game on a global basis, it becomes possible to percieve a playing climate where 6 weeks are spent playing in a Premier league, followed by 1-2 weeks downtime, which is in turn followed by a 6-8 week window where countries are available to tour or host international matches.

This hypothesis becomes more feasable if the 3 strongest cricket regions in the world were to align their respective premier leagues so as not to clash and hence share in the spoils.

Imagine the following cricket schedule of the Australian cricket team in a calender year:

Australiasian Premier League, Nov-Dec (played across Aust and NZ)
International cricket window, Jan-Feb (Australia hosts international matches, tests and one-days)
Asian Premier League, Mar-Apr (hosted by IND, PAK, BAN, SL)
International cricket window, May-June (Australia tour England or West indies, or host BAN in the top end)
English Premier League, July-Aug (hosted by ENG, possible 'B'-grade matches in West Indies
International cricket window, Sept-Oct (Australia tour RSA, IND, PAK, BAN)

Obviously, this is a rudimentary calenday - durations, locations and the like could all be tweaked to suit international calendars.

Nonetheless, the realisation must be made that T20 cricket can offer the type of money that international cricket boards cannot, and subsequently players will tend to align themselves with the employer they can make the most money from with their given skills, due to the short time frame of their professional employment.

I don't usually like to couch sports in such terms as 'employee', 'market-forces' and the like, but corporatisation and globalisation of the game has forced the game to be treated in such a manner, and consequently theories must be made that realise the condition of the environment in which it lives.

Maybe the 'fast-foodisation' of cricket is not such a bad thing. Some of the initiatives of the IPL have been fantastic. The 'Fairplay' award, the coloured hats for leading run-getter and wicket-taker, the Maxiumum sixes award, and so on.

Moreover, a clear delineation of the international and franchise-based systems will possibly see the emergence of different types of cricketers, in much the same way many footballers are better club players than international players and vice-versa.