So this got me thinking, what exactly does India want this to become? At the moment, as I see it, with a requirement for 7 Indian players per side you are giving a large number of Indian youngsters really great exposure to very competitive Twenty20 cricket. The likes of Saurabh and Manoj Tiwary, Virat Kohli and Manish Pandey, to name just a few, are developing into fabulous talents to the great benefit of Indian cricket as a whole. Its too early to say definitively right now, after only two completed IPLs what the impact of the IPL will be on India, but the likes of Pandey in particular wouldn't have come to such wide attention without it.
Above: Manish Pandey celebrates his hundred - the first and only Indian to score a hundred in the IPL (so far - Sehwag's got a 94 and Raina a 98).
But what if the number of overseas was increased to five or six, so that Kolkata could fit Brendon McCullum and Chris Gayle in the side along with Owais Shah, Shane Bond, Angelo Mathews etc., Rajasthan could afford to field an attack featuring Morne Morkel and Shaun Tait, rather than having to pick one of the two? For sure you'd get some cracking cricket, but India cricket would lose more than it would gain in my opinion.
If there was only room for 5 Indians in any given side, and remember there's one 'icon' player (Tendulkar at Mumbai, Sehwag at Delhi and so on) per team, so only room for four and sometimes fewer up-and-coming Indians per side the IPL would cease to be a hotbed of young Indian talent.
Of course you'd get the odd one or two coming through, but more often than not the experienced overseas players would fill the top order slots and bowl the crucial overs, because so much rides on them. Just like the raison d'etre of the County Championship is to produce players for England, at least one of the key goals of the Indian Premier League should be to develop players for India.
Granted with two new franchises there will be more slots across the board, but I think as a matter of principle the number should remain at four to maximise the development of young Indian players.
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Yeah, I saw that too, I remember thinking, "That's ridiculous!"
From it you get the idea of what sort of audience is watching - the kind that would do away with Tests sooner rather than later.
Interesting. However, the organizers need to strike a balance between the opportunity for Indian players and the overall quality of the tournament. If they feel that with 10 clubs the overall quality is dipping a bit, it might not be a bad idea to let 5 overseas players play for a couple of years and then evaluate again on bringing it down to 4. It will still give opportunity for 60 domestic players for 2 years. However, the reason they might be not inclined to do that might be the organizers fear of losing control. From the FICA standoff a couple of weeks ago, they might be worried that they might be subjected to similar withdrawal threats and that might prompt them not to increase their reliance on overseas players.
That's an excellent point, I hadn't thought of that aspect - the more foreign players they have the less control they have, I suppose you could put it like that. I think, with the new franchises and the voracious appetite for creating an ever-bigger spectacle, its likely that they'll put the quota up to five per team, but I just don't think that's the right route to go down.
Or maybe it will be used as with some of the more wealthy clubs in football, buying up the good players to deny the competition their skills.....thus giving India an edge on the world stage.
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