BCCI's dozen

It’s impossible to pin down a specific cause for India’s downturn since the world cup victory. It’s a free for all. You think Dhoni’s captaincy sucks? Fine. You think the decades old system of Ranji Trophy needs to be turned upside down? Fair enough. Sachin should retire? Gambhir has no business walking out in whites again? Sehwag should declare himself unavailable for tours abroad? Well, to each his own.

What about that two-month long marathon gig that should be completely insulated from the post mortem? Can I, if you don’t mind, ponder over its impact on the performance of the Indian team? Like, for a few minutes? You can give the clean chit to IPL at the end of this post.

IPL has been in existence since 2008 – yes. India became the no.1 ranked test team subsequent to that – yes. India has been inflicted whitewashes abroad in the pre-IPL days too – yes. And it has even lost the odd home series comprehensively in the past. Therefore it has had no impact? What next? Despite the large scale corruption scandals in India, the markets haven’t tanked. In fact, relatively they have outperformed many other economies in the global market. Are we to infer corruption has no relevance to India’s growth, or perhaps that it has a positive effect?

India won the longest world cup ever on April 02, 2011. The longest ever IPL (at that time) started on April 08, 2011. Of course, being on the road for 4 months on the trot has no impact on the team’s performance for the rest of the year. A week after the IPL we embarked on a tour of West Indies. Naturally, a lot of cricketers withdrew from the tour – some on account of injury, some chose to rest. The team trundled to a 1-0 victory in the test series, which followed the ODI series, with a farcical end to the last test at Dominica.

The full strength team got together for the first time since January 2011 against England in their backyard with the no.1 ranking at stake. Oh wait, it wasn’t exactly full strength. Sehwag wasn’t available because he hadn’t recovered fully from his shoulder surgery which was postponed due to his IPL commitments. Zaheer Khan, the spearhead of the Indian attack with a fragile fitness record, broke down on the first day of the tour. Obviously, we should completely separate playing nonstop cricket for 4 months and the subsequent injuries.

The table below lists the number of matches India has played in each format since 2001: 

So, India has been playing more or less the same amount of international matches in the post-IPL world as it did pre-IPL. In effect, a giant sized tournament has been superimposed on Indian cricket (and cricket world at large) over and above what seems to have been an already packed calendar. But let’s all pretend that cricket calendar is flexible enough to accommodate 14 months in a year.

This is just the direct impact of adding IPL to the existing calendar. What about the indirect impact? Didn’t the franchises seek permission to play associates and affiliates outside of IPL recently? The board’s working committee approved it too. What about that joke of a one-off T-20 in South Africa? Would BCCI do that with England? And the plethora of ODIs against Sri Lanka? If IPL and Champions League hijack two months and some from the calendar, the quid pro quo surrounding IPL may take away a few more weeks.

There used to be this debate on international players playing Ranji Trophy to strengthen the competition, improve the quality of cricket, and thereby produce better cricketers, you remember? Take any of the Indian players who play both the formats and check how many Ranji Trophy matches they have played since 2008. It’s laughable (Not that it was particularly healthy earlier, but since IPL it’s been far worse). Yet, ridiculing the first class system is perfectly acceptable, but IPL is kosher?

IPL may or may not contribute to erosion of test cricket skills. Players may even work out a way to seamlessly shift between three formats in the future. But to think that the IPL workload will have no impact on the performance in international competitions is not just naïve, but downright foolish.

What can the players do? There is extraordinary pressure on superstars to play as many IPL matches as possible due to their commercial value. If the pressure isn’t quite the same for the lesser players, the opportunity cost of missing out is huge. How is it fair to question the motives of cricketers to earn money in as legitimate a way as the ecosystem permits them to? In fact, cricketers have so far exhibited greater moral certitude than the prevailing system of incentives entails them to. Cricketers, largely, still understand that they earn their stripes from international cricket. No one has really tried to maximize the buck per bang by shortchanging international cricket for greater focus on IPL. They are merely caught in a situation spiraling out of their control, where they can't be at their best at all times of the year, and they can do very little about it.

The franchises have poured in huge money into IPL and they can’t be expected to put the interests of the national cricket team ahead of theirs either.

That leaves us with BCCI. Isn’t there a fundamental conflict of interest in letting the same board administer both the national cricket team and the IPL? If we had different administrative bodies for the two, would they have scheduled a 50-day IPL a week after a 42-day World Cup? Would the national board have given a no objection certificate to let Sehwag play for Delhi Daredevils risking a suspect shoulder? Would we be putting IPL as the center of our cricketing universe and find solutions around it for all our woes in test cricket? Would Rahul Sharma have been selected as part of the test squad ever? Oh, there’s also the more explicit conflict of interest. Blah blah blah.

Indian cricket’s bear run may have been contributed by a variety of factors, but the team wouldn’t have cruised (to borrow the term Gideon Haigh used to described India’s performance in Australia) to such a low without IPL for sure.

Where do we go from here? 

The current FTP running till 2020 seems to be a lot more sensible than the last one. So, BCCI can do worse than strictly adhering to the FTP and avoid the ad hoc friendship series and other quid pro quo fests.

In an ideal world, cricketers need at least a month off from all forms of cricket. They need to participate in the good part of the Ranji Trophy too.  There needs to be at least two practice matches in every away series. Even fully complying with the FTP won’t make for the ideal schedule. In 2014 alone India will be playing in South Africa, New Zealand, England and Australia. Add in the IPL and the Champions League. That’s an explosive schedule. There has to be a way to compress the IPL to a more manageable timeframe. Two months is simply unsustainable. 

India may go on to lose despite these changes. But at least the board would have given the team its best chance to succeed.

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This piece was originally published here.

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