Click to play videoOn a day when more than Rs 160 crore was spent to buy 86 cricketers, Cricket's Big Baazar changed the gentleman’s game and the gentlemen forever.
Players across the cricketing globe were bought out by top business tycoons and film stars as bids for Indian Premier League (IPL) .
Indian ODI skipper MS Dhoni was bought by Chennai Superkings for Rs 6 crore, while Australian all-rounder Andrew Symonds, on the other hand, out-priced his skipper Ricky Ponting at Rs 5.4 crore.
Sanath Jayasuriya may be at the end of his cricketing career, but that did not stop Mumbai from shelling out Rs 3.9 crore.
But the one that surprised everyone was Ishant Sharma – who at the age of 19 – commands a sum of Rs 3.8 crore, was bought over by the Shah Rukh Khan owned Kolkata. Irfan Pathan justified his appeal with Rs 3.7 crore for the Mohali team.
The cricketers are laughing all the way to the bank, but do the big bucks compare to what international superstars pocket? What's the future of this latest cricket avatar? Is big money the best thing that happened to Indian cricket? This was the question on Wednesday's Face the Nation with CNN-IBN's Bhupendra Chaubey and Gaurav Kalra.
Former India captain and IPL's Chennai team's brand ambassador Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Ayaz Memon, Associate Editor, DNA, actor and TV anchor Mandira Bedi, and Lokesh Sharma, Managing Director of 21st Century Media debated the issue.
Bidders at the IPL's auctioning claimed that the bidding was the beginning of a new future – a future where top cricketers from different parts of the world will play in India for Indian cities.
With unprecedented money being pumped in by none other than cricketing powerhouse India, has Indian cricket and world cricket changed forever?
Lokesh Sharma seems to agree. "It's going to be a watershed in the history of global cricket, because this is the first time that a free enterprise, private enterprises come into play. For the first time, club cricket is taking an international flavour. So I think this is going to be a major point."
TV personality and cricket expert Mandira Bedi, however, swears that IPL will be known for its cricket, "which is as much of a sport as it is entertainment. It will give it that extra punch. It will be known for taking that entertainment quotient a notch higher."
There was a lot of talk that the IPL would be all a big tamasha and will be a lot of marketing and a lot of hype and nothing else, but in the way the teams have been picked, it has thrown open the debate of sound cricketing logic being behind the formation of the teams.
Ayaz Memon says: "There has certainly been some hard-fought strategy going in. Everybody had $5 million to spend, so you couldn't take 11 of the marquee names. I think there is a skew in favour of the all-rounders, especially guys who can score virtually off every ball. The first three biggest stars are all of that. Jayasuriya is an interesting case: at 38, he is the kind of guy who can clear the ropes at will, bowl four good overs. I think it is very clearly thought out and the advisors have had a lot to do with it."
But doesn't it defy logic that a new kid on the block gets more than Rs 3 crore while Ricky Ponting, who is the best batsman in the world, gets Rs 1.6 crore?
"I think the IPL is all about Indians. The Indians will definitely have more preference, they will command more money than the foreigners," Srikkanth explains.
Bedi, on the other hand, wants to know what the buyers were thinking when they were putting their bids. "Was it the case of all-rounders or Indian players. How do you explain a Rohit Sharma being paid more than a Ricky Ponting? I don't get it. I'm finding that a lot of the bids were overpriced. There is a lot of imbalance in the bids as far as the quality of the players go."
A lot of us have been obsessively talking about the crores. For the advertisers in the country, this is going to be the biggest brand-selling exercise, but is the IPL going to invite sticky eyeballs?
"Let the product roll out, but on the face of it, all the ingredients seem to be right. It's created so much of excitement that I don't see any reason why people would go and watch it. But we are basing our assessment on the basis of what is happening in domestic cricket. None of these associations were able to create any kind of a community building exercise. But once these clubs get into this act, they pull in the people. And once the people come in, I'm sure the whole thing will do very well," notes Sharma.
But is cricket now as rich as any other top international sport? And to answer this question, India's football icon Baichung Bhutia joined the debate at this junction.
"I think it's great to see cricket benefiting out of it, it's always good to see sportspersons earning good money. If you look at the kind of money the BCCI has got and the kind of money cricketers were getting paid was not paid, but the IPL is the right thing for the cricketers to come in. Cricket is the only game in the country where cricketers played for the country and making money out of it," Bhutia, India's captain of the football team, says.
But Lokesh Sharma warns that other sports are not going to benefit from this venture. "This venture is purely on commercial consideration. It is something that makes sense to Shahrukh Khan and I don't see any reason as to why he should be obliged to support any other sport."
Bedi labels this as the new revolution of cricket. "This is the baseball culture we are looking at. We are looking at fathers and sons coming to watch a game of T20 cricket through the evening, also a platform for young players to cut it at this level."
However, Bhutia observed that IPL has done a lot of good for other sporting bodies across the country, who will take a cue and market their sport as a business venture.
Final result of SMS poll: Is big money the best thing that happened to Indian cricket?
Yes: 58 per cent
No: 42 per cent
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