How will the new Indian cricket leagues change the face of our beloved game?

Sports betting fans must be wondering what’s happening in the world of cricket with the formation of two new Twenty20 leagues by the Indian Cricket League (ICL) and the Indian Premier League (IPL) in India. These competitions are attracting huge interest from online betting sites in this country and cricket fans in India and making lots of money for the cricketing authorities there from the sale of television and marketing rights.

From all this they are able to offer cricketers from all over the world large amounts of money for relatively short amounts of time spent on the field. Our own County Cricket people are wondering what the future holds after Dimitri Mascarenhas, the Hampshire player, signed for the IPL for £50,000. He will miss a few games for his county but his county has been compensated and all parties report that they are happy with the affair.

The real problem is the potential threat to test cricket that these new kinds of competition bring. Cricketing Boards across the world are beginning to devise sanctions to try to stem the tide of cricketers signing up for these leagues. One such sanction is to bar a player from playing for his country for a year or two. This will inevitably make some players think twice but the rewards are difficult to turn down and many will crack under the temptation. Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, and a number of fellow team mates, have signed up for the IPL, and Ponting gets it right when he wonders where it will all lead. The limited playing time of 44 days in the Indian season means players can spend more time with their families and avoid the arduous and endless travelling and months away from home that test cricket normally demands.

Enthusiasts of sports betting will probably think that change might now be a bad thing with County Cricket hardly presenting the most exciting kind of cricket. There’s definitely a move towards the shorter, sharper game and One Day matches or Twenty20 are attracting younger audiences drawn by the speed of action and the excitement generated in these hard fought games. Betting opportunities on sites such as Blue Square and Ladbrokes are more and varied and you get the result today rather than next week. Doubtless we will see the advent of more and more competitions like this in our own country. The trouble is that here we don’t have the fanatical support from such a large number of fans as exists in India and it will be hard to compete financially.

The problem to be solved, however, is that test cricket is the basis of all cricketing expertise. The demands of the game in this form, are behind the honing of the rare talents of these players, now so in demand for the fun side of the sport. Without test cricket there will be no players and this explains the panic now gripping the worlds cricketing authorities. A new era demands a new approach and world cricket must seize the moment if the sport is to survive.