The world’s richest cricket tournament starts on Friday. As is tradition, most Australians will be asleep. The IPL has always taken the shape of one of those ungraspable dreams here, all haze and fog in our consciousness, a swirl of dizzying colours, shapes, sounds and salaries – 3am finishes will do that to you. When we wake, a weary scroll might sling us some highlights of somebody doing something. The TV and the papers might show us an Australian doing something. Like most dreams, soon after we wake, we ask ourselves: “what happened again?”
That said, people who like cricket should be pretty familiar with fatigue by now. We’re not out of March, and the IPL is the ninth global T20 tournament to be staged in 2023, following the BBL, Super Smash, BPL, SA20, ILT20, Women’s T20 World Cup, PSL, and WPL. From the start of February to mid-March, there was Test cricket scheduled every single day involving Zimbabwe, West Indies, England, New Zealand, Australia, India, South Africa and Sri Lanka. There were probably some one-dayers. A Sheffield Shield. It is very hard to keep up.
But that kind of content squeeze won’t happen in April and May. The IPL takes place unthreatened and unfettered, fresh from its US $6.3bn media rights deal announced last year. In three years’ time it will expand to three months, and that’s just the tournament in India. In Abu Dhabi’s ILT20, three of the league’s six franchises are owned by IPL owners, all six teams in South Africa’s SA20 are IPL subsidiaries, and the newly formed Major League Cricket (MLC) in the US will see IPL franchises own four of the six teams from its inception.
The imperial march of franchise cricket continues unabated. As IPL owners hoover up players and locations, they’re gradually hoovering up time for cricket that isn’t IPL. Test match viewers are entitled to wonder how Australia might have fared with a comprehensive preparation for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in India. Instead, Steve Smith was making hundreds at the C.ex Coffs International Stadium against the Strikers. The private equity conversation loiters in the shadows and the BBL naturally wants to amplify its value. To be fair, Smith was great to watch that week.
As the IPL strides, lots of other cricket adapts, or rationalises, or dies, depending on your appetite for euphemism. Other countries are making their moves. South Africa, by force or otherwise, are all-in on IPL owners, divesting from Test cricket this next cycle. The genius of Bazball isn’t just its swagger, but the way it marries techniques from divergent formats for maximum efficiency. Still on England, many Australians may not have noticed that it now reserves its peak professional cricket season for its franchise product, The Hundred. Said product received its own, massive, private equity offer last year. This year’s Ashes has been pushed to England’s shoulder season, starting two months earlier than tradition dictates. It would be equivalent to the Ashes starting in October here. Would Cricket Australia countenance something similar? The turnout to last year’s T20 World Cup might provide the answer.
How does Australian cricket reckon with this rapidly changing landscape? Fans remain conditioned to Kerry Packer’s gift, which was cricket on our terms: in our summer, over 4-6 weeks, during our holidays, against the world’s best, when it suited us. That was our monopoly. But Australia’s grasp on summer as we know it is diminishing. The BBL’s window was shortened due to foreign franchise tournaments (thank you ILT20), footy goes for longer, and while it’s fantastic to have an all-conquering Test team, it’s less so when there’s fewer teams and players to play against. Like Labor with Aukus, Australian cricket is jammed both domestically and internationally. If there is a strategy, it’s difficult to detect.
Though the cricket world changes, nothing has directly and materially impacted the primary barometers of our own health. The men’s Test team is probably the best in the world and the women’s team are unstoppable everywhere. But erosion is there. Though unconfirmed, a two-tier competition looms in South Australian premier cricket, where players are said to have known they were playing for a spot in the top-tier competition, and teams flew in players from around the country in the final stretch to preserve their place. Clubs may die. Another club in Sydney regularly sends texts to the ex-players group asking if they could help fill lower grades. This may be par for the course lower down the chain, but not at premier/grade cricket level. There are no Indian TV consumers for these competitions, yet.
Understandably, Cricket NSW and Cricket Victoria have shot for a seat at the foreign domestic franchise table, each providing high-performance resources to Washington (NSW) and San Francisco (Victoria) in exchange for a fee, and a potential equity stake later on. But many officials say that no one really understands the aims of IPL franchises. That maybe we’re just in the first stages of a game of Monopoly. They go around the board, buying everything they see, knocking everyone out, before dealing from a position of strength.
In this new world, players are within their rights to Partridge Shrug and seek the most coin. And for the IPL advocates, there’s a workaround for that problem of Australia’s sleepy timezone. Because while it might be tough to watch the Kolkata Knight Riders this Saturday night, the LA Knight Riders will play at 11am AEST in the US this July. In their perfect world, the sun never sets on the Knight Riders, and the IPL marches on.
