Saturday, February 23, 2008

Cricketers Under Corporate Hammer

My Grand Father was born in a wrong Generation. He was getting a pension of Rs 75 per month till mid 90s. He has privilege of playing first Ranji trophy match way back in 1936. In those days it playing cricket is honorary players were not paid for Ranji trophy matches. Now a player gets 1 lakh per Ranji trophy match.

Once Bishen signh bedi told that In 1956 when we beat New Zealand the match was over in 4days they were paid Rs 50 as daily allowance. All the players were paid for only 4 days. When one of player asked the Cricket officials for the 5th day allowance the reply was “why did you finish the match in 4 days”. Last week we saw historic auctioning of the cricketers for IPL in Mumbai. Probably this will be the first time that a Human beings were auctioned with full support of Media and public.

Now the BCCI has opened the doors for the corporates to fund and run the teams. This is not new in there are lot of corporates were supporting the game for more than 40 years like Sanmar, India cements, SBI, MRF, TVS to name a few they had interest to promote the game. This time people Ambanis, Mallays have entered the fray. The main difference is to build the brand and make profits.

BCCI has given the rights to corporate to run the cricket, gate collections ,share in the T.V rights I wonder if every things was given the so called franchisee of the team what for the cricket associations are still exists. Corporatastion has started with 20 : 20 games know one whose other formats will also move in to this category

The main aim of IPL is to push ICL to dust everybody knows that ICL wont succeed this was seen during the inaugural tournament by the poor response ICL got. So please see the game the as game do not corpotise by selling the players and spoiling the game and young cricketers with Money. They were reports that Under 19 cricketers were being signed for lakhs by the franchisee that too during Under 19 World cup which is in progress.

The game of Cricket started by English men , mastered by Aussies, sold by Indians.