Economics and politics dominated an auction that left a pair of veterans counting their blessings

If you’re Mohammad Kaif, a lottery ticket would be a smart move, while Damien Martyn could do worse than contemplate the tables at Bellagio or Caesar’s Palace. Neither man has played international cricket for more than three years, and Kaif’s performances in the inaugural Indian Premier League – he didn’t even make the Rajasthan Royals squad for the second season in South Africa – were as ordinary as Martyn’s brief flirtation with the nearly forgotten Indian Cricket League.

The Royals, captained and coached by Shane Warne, bought out Kaif’s $675,000 (£412,000) contract before the auction to free up the space that they then filled with the classy 38-year-old batsman who was once Warne’s brother in baggy-green arms. If that raised eyebrows, there was bemusement when Kings XI Punjab, who have appointed Kumar Sangakkara as captain in place of Yuvraj Singh, splashed out $250,000 for Kaif, whose batting is usually conspicuously devoid of the power and pizzazz associated with Twenty20 cricket.

Many of the headlines in England on Wednesday will focus on the lack of interest in Graeme Swann, but the Twitter-friendly off-spinner’s IPL tale is far from over. The auction represents only the most high-profile route into the league. There are other ways. Both the Mumbai Indians and the Chennai Super Kings have injured players that they can replace before the action begins on 12 March. In Mumbai’s case, they will have only the $100,000 that they spent on Kyle Mills last season, but Chennai have a whopping $1.55 million to draw on, having seen Andrew Flintoff go under the surgeon’s knife yet again. Don’t be surprised to see Swann or Doug Bollinger, another who attracted no interest, fielding a few calls from agents over the coming days.

With the auction taking place in Mumbai, a city subjected to the worst terror attacks ever seen in India, there was little doubt that the story of the day was the shunning of the 11 Pakistan players on the auction list. When Richard Madley, who usually helps sell antiques and Read more…

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AS NSW and Victoria prepare to play in the Champions League first semi-final late tonight, the competition has become a major embarrassment for the billion-dollar Indian Premier League.

None of the teams from the much-hyped, mega-rich IPL have made the semi-finals of the inaugural Champions League, with the Cape Cobras, from Cape Town, and Trinidad and Tobago playing off in the second semi-final tomorrow night.

The IPL had three sides in the 12-team competition, which brought together the best domestic Twenty20 teams from the eight leading cricket nations, playing for $6.6million in prize-money. NSW and Victoria are already guaranteed $550,000 for making the semi-finals and one of the sides will make $1.4m for reaching the final, with $2.6m on offer for winning the tournament.

Prize-money is shared between the players and the state associations. State players who do not have Cricket Australia contracts will make about as much in a fortnight as they would for an entire domestic season - $120,000 - if they claim the title.

NSW and Australia veteran Stuart Clark claimed there was surprise among the Australians that IPL sides had not fared better.

“We expected them to be quite dominant, given we were playing in their conditions and given their IPL experience,” Clark told The Australian.

“The reality is they’ve been outplayed by other teams from around the world. It says what we’ve always believed, that Australian domestic cricket is strong and that’s why the Australian team is strong.”

The tournament was on course for a Victoria-NSW final until the Cape Cobras suffered an upset last-round loss to the Delhi Daredevils in a dead rubber. “It would have been nice if two Australian teams had made the final because it would have been a great showpiece for Australian cricket and how good domestic cricket is in our country,” Clark said.

“Once this game starts, it’s going to be a little bit weird because two Australian Read more…

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Cash-rich IPL sides are struggling to compete with the so-called minnows of the Champions League

The Champions League needed a Super Over as much as an old roué needs Viagra. For almost a week, games not involving the Indian Premier League sides had been played out in front of largely empty stands, curtain-raisers to the main event. It didn’t help that the marquee names – the Royal Challengers, the Delhi Daredevils and the Deccan Chargers – all belly-flopped badly at the first time of asking, beaten by teams operating on a fraction of their budgets.

Like the boy Pepe in the Asterix comics who goes red in the face, the franchise owners sat short of breath in their ivory-tower boxes, contemplating the vast investments that had led to such humiliation. For the neutral who abhors the Real Madrid-Manchester City model and what it has done to sport, those were moments to savour, with the Cape Cobras and Somerset the equivalent of an AEK Athens or Standard Liège.

Tuesday was different. A double-header in Delhi, with not one Indian side in action. Few turned up, but those that did conform to the jaded stereotype about Indians loving the game wouldn’t have gone home disapppointed. First, the Wayamba Elevens, with Kumar Sangakkara trying hard not to be partial in the commentary box, successfully defended 118 against a Victorian Bushrangers side that had routed Delhi. They missed out on the next stage because of net run-rate, but until Andrew McDonald came along and slugged a few down the ground, Victoria had looked alarmingly vulnerable, caught between the quest for victory and the pursuit of 83 that would guarantee a place in the next phase.

With the entire square having been relaid in the summer, this was another slow and low pitch. On such surfaces, no batsman is ever in, no run chase a formality. That was illustrated beautifully in the second game, as the Diamond Eagles went from 70 for 0 at halfway to 115 for 4 with just one ball remaining. The South Africa-asphyxiation headlines were already composed when Ryan McLaren – an exception because of time spent with Kent? – coolly picked up a Yasir Read more…

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» Inaugural match thrills 50,000 crowd in Bangalore
» Duminy’s unbeaten 99 stuns Royal Challengers

There were 30,000 inside the Estádio Nacional in Lisbon on September 4, 1955, when Sporting drew 3-3 with Partizan Belgrade. There was no glitzy opening ceremony or a global TV audience of more than half a billion when the European Cup got under way, but more than half a century on, Lalit Modi hopes that the Champions League Twenty20 will revolutionise cricket in the same way that Gabriel Hanot’s brainchild did club football.

Close to 50,000 watched the opening game at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, and after kung-fu-fighting Shaolin monks, a laser show and Shaggy of In The Summertime fame had primed the crowd, the hometown Royal Challengers, without Kevin Pietersen, were ambushed by a dazzling unbeaten 99 from JP Duminy, the hero of last year’s MCG Test. Henry Davids, Justin Ontong and Ryan Canning kept the strike ticking over for the Cape Cobras, and Duminy did the rest as the Royal Challengers’ slow-bowling duo of Anil Kumble and Roelof van der Merwe were taken for 69 in eight overs. Kumble dropped a tough caught-and-bowled chance when he had 74, but otherwise, it was an accomplished innings.

The Royal Challengers’ innings was built around half-centuries from Robin Uthappa and New Zealand’s Ross Taylor. Charl Langeveldt had given the visitors the perfect start, having Jacques Kallis caught behind, but with catches going down in the murky atmosphere and lofted hits falling into gaps, Uthappa and Rahul Dravid wrested the initiative.

Langeveldt went off with a jarred shoulder after dropping a catch and in the final stages, his team-mates had no answer to Taylor’s aggression. Monde Zondeki and Rory Kleinveldt bowled far too many full tosses and Taylor (53 off 24 balls) blazed away for 33 in the last two Read more…

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Two fine administrators stand arrayed against each other and in doing so they weaken an event whose success they have contributed much to. The IPL is one of India’s best brands, even for one so young, and you can see its importance by the fact that it is blamed for many ills elsewhere! But for all its success, the IPL is still on a learning curve, it still needs many strong hands on its shoulders and it can ill afford a tug-of-war. Both Lalit Modi and N Srinivasan have much to benefit, as indeed does the BCCI, in a strong IPL.

But if Modi and Srinivasan are on a collision course, it shows up a familiar weakness in the Indian business and administrative environment. As a nation, we run on personalities not systems, on charisma not content, and that is why we build such few strong institutions. A fine municipal commissioner or, a rarer commodity, a good member of parliament, can make a huge difference but as soon as they are gone, either due to bureaucratic or electoral fickleness, their effectiveness tends to go with them; normal service is resumed, chaos reigns. That is largely because we are a nation of individuals who believe systems are for everybody else. But if the IPL wants to be equally successful, be just as strong a property, twenty years from now, it will have to learn to live without Lalit Modi at some time as indeed will India Cements have to learn to live without Srinivasan.

I suspect you will find that most great institutions are established by visionaries, it is their passion that takes them through the early years of acceptance and frustration. But thereafter institutions run themselves, built as they are on solid foundations. You can see that at IIM-Ahmedabad where the great Vikram Sarabhai was the visionary. It is as powerful forty five years later. Infosys is headed that way with Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani slowly stepping aside. The IPL has a visionary in Lalit Modi but if it wants to compete with Wimbledon or the English FA or the Augusta Masters it must create strong systems and ease away from personality cults. Modi and Read more…

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For a coach who wanted 4, or was it 11, captains for his team, it is no surprise that he couldn't settle on a single title for his book. John Buchanan's literary offering on cricket appears to have two titles on the cover. The Future of Cricket comes on top, The Rise of Twenty20, follows. That apart, the cover also has a strap line: When money talks, cricket listens. How big money, administrators are powering a new cricket world: an inside account. Phew! Can't this guy keep anything simple?

The book's juicy parts have already made national headlines. When you write adversely about Gavaskar, Harbhajan and Yuvraj, you are sure to grab eyeballs. And when you write lines such as in T20 "you have to be inventive, fearless. And I don't see those qualities as part of Sachin's make-up at this stage of his career. Sachin Tendulkar is still a great player, but not in this arena of T20," everybody is eager to find out what you say next.  Buchanan may have led KKR to the bottom but the book demonstrates his genius for marketing himself.

Reading the book one gets the impression that Buchanan is a mastermind at predicting the distant future. But he is not so adept at dealing with the present or the immediate future. He certainly didn't know that KKR will finish last in IPL2.  And that he will get the boot Read more...

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It’s been a week since the spectacular IPL final and the not so spectacular closing ceremony. You don’t need to be very smart to know that Deccan Chargers won a taut final after facing the ignominy of being the winners of the wooden spoon last year.

The runner-up was Royal Challengers, a team that was perhaps rightly branded last year as a test team and had finished seventh. They were not much different this year as the highly valued Kevin Pietersen, who was supposed to give momentum to the side as captain and key batsman, nearly derailed the challenge till Anil Kumble, the former test captain, stepped in to show the way with a little help from Ross Taylor to end up a close second. Read more…

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