Let Indian male cricketers play in foreign T20 leagues as well

Imran Tahir, a Pakistan born leg-spinner, is by far the best example of a journeyman cricketer. His profile on ESPN Cricinfo suggests that over the years he has played for 54 different teams, including representing South Africa in international cricket and playing in the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Tahir’s team hopping has been made possible by the proliferation of T20 cricket leagues all over the world. Also, a cricketer, unlike a footballer, doesn’t necessarily have to stick to playing for just one team during a year, because T20 league tournaments are nowhere as long as football seasons.

The English Premier League is a football league which is played from August to May. In comparison, the IPL, the longest T20 cricket league, is played over eight weeks. A cricketer can play the IPL from late March to late May, then move on to playing the Hundred’s competition in England in August and then the Big Bash League in Australia towards the end of the year.

Now Tahir is not the only journeyman cricketer jetting around. There are several West Indian cricketers who fit this bill as well. Also, in the West Indian case, many cricketers prefer playing for the more lucrative T20 leagues than representing the West Indies.

The way things are looking, the number of journeyman cricketers who play for different T20 teams at the cost of representing their national teams might just go up, as the number of T20 cricket leagues, which were only proliferating earlier, are now in explosive mode.

Also, the owners of IPL teams have bought teams in new leagues in the United Arab Emirates, South Africa and the US. And like any other business looking to grow bigger, they are searching for economies of scale, which includes bulk hiring of a few players to represent their different teams. Take the case of West Indians Andre Russell and Sunil Narine. They represent four franchises owned by the Knight Riders, including the Kolkata Knight Riders. Tim David and Dewald Brevis will represent three teams owned by the Mumbai Indians franchise, including MI.

Indeed, these firms are possibly also looking for economies of scale on the human front. As the same set of players play for these teams all over the world, their chances of playing as a unit go up, hopefully improving their win ratio.

Of course, this also implies that opportunities for good cricketers all over the world to ply their trade go up, except for Indian male cricketers. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) does not allow them to play in foreign T20 leagues, unless they retire. The idea behind BCCI acting like a monopolist is that if Indian cricketers are allowed to play in other leagues, the primacy of IPL would be diluted. People can currently see Indian cricketers play T20 matches only in the IPL (except for international matches) and that leads to advertisers paying top dollar.

But this comes at a cost. One of the reasons a team like England is so good at T20 cricket is because its players play in leagues all across the world and thus, end up having the experience of playing in different conditions. Indian players don’t enjoy this advantage.

In fact, when India played Pakistan last October in the T20 World Cup, Pakistani fast bowler Harris Rauf was bowling like a dream. One reason for that was that he had the experience of playing for Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash, the Australian T20 league. The home ground for the Stars happens to be the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the very ground on which India was playing Pakistan. Of course, it took the genius of Virat Kohli to help India win that game.

Further, there are cricketers whose main focus is T20 cricket, and they lose out on playing and financial opportunities. Take cricketers like Krunal Pandya, Rahul Tewatia, T. Natarajan, M. Shahrukh Khan, Jitesh Sharma and Yuzvendra Chahal, among others. They could gain some valuable experience and earn more money if allowed to play in overseas leagues. This would help the BCCI gauge the quality of T20 cricketers in various conditions and not just Indian conditions, before picking up the national team.

To conclude, as often happens in the case of a new innovation, the regulator, in this case the International Cricket Council (ICC), is finally catching up with the marketplace of mushrooming T20 cricket leagues. There is talk of restrictions being put in place because there is a real danger that cricketers might choose to play in T20 leagues rather than represent their country.

Other than West Indian cricketers, English cricketer Jason Roy recently forfeited his contract to be able to play in the T20 league in the US. The New Zealand cricketer Trent Boult had also given up on his central contract in 2022.

One thing that ICC can possibly do is limit the number of teams a cricketer can choose to represent during a year. But the question is whether this will survive a legal challenge. At the end of the day, how can any regulator limit the amount of work an individual chooses to take on? Also, if a cricketer chooses to play for too many teams and his performance suffers in the process, he will bear the costs for it as well, with fewer teams wanting to pick him in the future. Basic economic incentives are at play here and cricketers are best placed to act on them.

Vivek Kaul is the author of ‘Bad Money’.