Tag: Finn Allen

The IPL’s dawdling, dazzling dozen foreign stars

Unlike the English Premier League, the Indian Premier League actually is Indian.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

WHAT could you do with USD2.5-million? A lot, no doubt. But we live in the real world — not the strange and magical bubble of unreality called the IPL, where money doesn’t seem to mean much unless it comes in numbers that have more zeroes attached than the rest of us have pairs of socks.

So many zeroes that a dozen foreign players fetched from afar and paid a total of INR205,500,000 — or USD2,574,563 at Thursday’s exchange rate — have yet to play a single match in this year’s tournament. A tournament, mind, which will be almost two-thirds complete after Thursday’s game between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Kolkata Knight Riders.

These arguably overpaid, unarguably underworked players range from Quinton de Kock, who has been earned USD825,638 sitting on the bench for Lucknow Super Giants, to Dasun Shanaka, who made USD61,154 from Gujarat Titans as a replacement for Kane Williamson. The New Zealander ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in the field during the tournament opener against Chennai Super Kings in Ahmedabad on March 31.

The others are Joe Root, Matthew Wade, Dewald Brevis, Chris Jordan — albeit his signing by Mumbai Indians as a replacement was announced as recently Sunday — Daniel Sams, Odean Smith, Finn Allen, Obed McCoy, Donovan Ferreira and Lungi Ngidi. Were it not for the fact that their ranks do not include a specialist spinner, that would be a decent squad of 12.

That none of them has been granted a single game seems outrageous considering the investment involved. Or maybe not. The most expensive player in IPL history, Sam Curran, was bought for this year’s edition by Punjab Kings for USD2,262,441 — a relatively marginal USD312,122 less than the combined fees of the dazzling but dawdling dozen.

Rajasthan Royals — Root, Ferreira and McCoy — and Gujarat — Shanaka, Smith and Wade — harbour half of these well-rested internationals between them. Lucknow have De Kock and Sams, and Brevis and Jordan are attached to Mumbai Indians. Allen is on Royal Challengers Bangalore’s books. Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Punjab Kings would seem to have made better use of their resources: they have no foreign bench-sitters. Again, maybe not — Punjab, KKR and SRH are all in the bottom half of the standings.

There’s another class of lesser spotted big-name internationals in the IPL. Glenn Phillips, one of only two century-makers at the T20 World Cup in Australia in October and November, has cracked the nod for Hyderabad just once. The other player to score a century on that stage, Rilee Rossouw, has played in four of Delhi Capitals’ nine games. Ben Stokes and Adil Rashid, key members of England’s triumph in that tournament, have featured in two matches each for Chennai and Hyderabad.

That every XI in the IPL cannot contain more than four foreigners is an obvious factor in this equation. But that is how it should be. There’s a clue in the first word of the league’s name. It is, after all, India’s own Premier League. It’s also Indian owned and, usually, played solely in India, the world’s biggest market for cricket. Accordingly of the 243 players currently in IPL squads 164 — 67.49% — are Indian.

Football’s English Premier League offers a cautionary tale of what happens when the numbers don’t make sense. English players account for 245 of the 680 names on the rosters of the 20 clubs. That’s little more than a third: 36.03%. It is also riddled with foreign ownership, much of it despised by supporters. The competition is England’s Premier League in name only. 

The IPL’s foreign quota and what that does to the make-up and balance of the teams picked offer many reasons why some of the game’s most prominent international players are spectators at the tournament. So we study every line-up, just in case today is the day. Some, in those players’ home countries, will do so in the hopes that their compatriots’ names stay off the team sheet. Rather they come back fresh, that argument goes.

How many reasons are there to keep an eye on who plays, and who does not play, in the IPL? Not as many as 2.5-million, but enough to make it a compulsory exercise for cricket fans the world over.

Cricbuzz

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Any colour you want at the SCG, as long as it’s green

Aussies don’t think about cricket at this time of year, in the same way some people don’t think about roast turkey until Christmas.

Telford Vice / Sydney Cricket Ground

UNTIL Kane Williamson loomed on screens around the ground upon winning the toss, you might have been in the dark about the identity of Pakistan’s opponents. There was plenty of vivid, vibrant, visible green — shirts, flags, face paint – near the gates hours before the match, and in due course it flowed into the stands. Black or grey? Not so much.

Certainly, the Sydney Morning Herald didn’t do much to ensure people knew there was a big game in their ’hood. A passing reference in Wednesday’s edition was made in a piece on how Australia might address their problems, quoting Matthew Hayden — Pakistan’s mentor — speaking at a “a T20 World Cup press conference previewing tonight’s semi-final against New Zealand at the SCG”.

And that was that. Would a knockout match in a global tournament in any other country be all but ignored because the hosts’ team hadn’t been good enough to reach the play-offs? Perhaps. Or maybe the paper was catering to a readership who didn’t seem that interested in the competition even when Australia were in the mix. 

There’s a theory that the Aussies don’t think about cricket at this time of year, in the same way that some people don’t think about roast turkey until Christmas. Australians also think of pavlova in December. Surely that’s Pavlovian?

Pakistanis wouldn’t understand these strange tendencies. Their passion for cricket burns bright year-round, and is focused on their beloved team — who reinvented themselves in the space of seven days after losing, cruelly, to India and, unthinkably, to Zimbabwe by beating South Africa at this very venue. The South Africans didn’t do much for the tournament, but by allowing Pakistan to recover from 43/4 and 95/5 to 185/9, and then floundering to a reply of 108/9, they helped them rekindle their fire. Good job: far rather a rising Pakistan in the semis than a discombobulating South Africa.

The warm-ups — Pakistan’s replete with three large national flags planted into the outfield — were backgrounded by a constant and growing burble of expectation. By the time the superfluousness of the anthems had been wearily observed, and Shaheen Afridi was finally gliding like a hawk through the shadows that shrouded the ground to bowl the first ball to Finn Allen, the stands were a veritable forest of green. Soon, the trees were talking. Or rather roaring their support in a towering tornado of urgent noise.

So you had to feel sorry for Marius Erasmus when he was proved wrong to have given Allen out leg-before to Afridi’s second delivery. When Erasmus raised his finger again after the next ball, for the same appeal, and had his decision confirmed electronically, you couldn’t do anything but admire his unflappability. It seems not all South Africans melt under pressure.

Sunset around the SCG prompts hundreds of birds to set a course to roost for the night. They fly far beyond the ground’s western boundaries, but not far enough to escape forming part of the pageant: a golden sky speckled with the silhouettes of creatures moving elegantly above, a heaving, singing, shouting, jubilating mass of green-clad people below, and a cricket ground that has retained enough of what it should be, thanks to the towers, swooning roofs and twirly iron work on the Members’ and Ladies’ pavilions to the west, to give the scene a hug in a way that mere stadiums cannot.

Even if you weren’t a Pakistan supporter or a ridiculously outnumbered New Zealand fan; if you were a disinterested Australian, or even a South African who was, justifiably, spitting with rage at that damned team and will be for years to come, you had to gape in appreciation. Cricket is a beautiful game.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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