This had to happen someday.
Business Sense versus Cricketing Knowledge having a public go at each other.
The Indian Premier League has had b(r)ought in a huge amount of glamour to the sport.
Well...not that cricket was suffering from any lack of it though..specially in the sub-continent.
Undeniable though that the the first edition of the IPL surely elevated the excitement to
hitherto unknown territory. Much of it was largely because the franchisees did cough up huge sums-- for
the players and infrastructure as well as promotions.
And the Public just loved the show. Even the cricket was of top quality.
However, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
What IPL had most significantly done, was to subtly place terms like 'franchisee', 'investment', 'returns', 'profits', 'break-even' alongside the more familiar jargon of 'deep midwickets', 'yorkers' & 'square cuts'.
The IPL had placed business barons, top-of-the rung actors & business conglomerates
right in the driver's seat. One would not fail to notice that previously cricket , business & Bollywood
would interact in a predictable fashion. You could have a cricketer-actress linkup, a cricketer endorsing a product of a business house or batsmen having certain logos on their bats. The point here was that nobody intruded into each others territory(notwithstanding Ajay Jadeja's foray into filmdom :-))
Hence you would not find Sunil Gavaskar's comments remotely connected to Shahrukh Khan's & vice-versa.
Then IPL happened.
Now, when Mr.Sunil Gavaskar slams John Buchanan in his column it is Shahrukh Khan who has to stand up
to defend the coach of his team. Nothing wrong in that though.( Its Something like your Boss defending you in
public from an outsider-whatever may be your equation at the workplace.)
To be honest, Arbitmind doesn't find anything unnatural in the whole saga of a comment & a '..buy a team..' retort.
What is striking though is that the IPL has bought people who are masters in their respective domains & at the same time completely ignorant about the others' trade... withing striking distance of each other.
Gone are the days where every Indian captain/coach would face the ire of former captains every time he would lose a match & gulp it down.
Captains/Coaches could not reply back...'Go make a team & lead them if you are so concerned'. Reactions to criticism would be as insipid as a 'Krishi Darshan'..ostensibly because being a smart alec in front of media persons was not something that the Board took very kindly. In the IPL age, team owners do not have such constraints....& hence Arbitmind presumes..one would see a whole lot of such ripostes in the near future.
After all no investor really likes to be told what to do with his money until & unless the advice is coming from a Warren Buffet himself. Neither would an all time great cricketer have a very kind view about a movie actor's cricketing acumen.
So get ready for these jibes & jabs...they will continue for some time.
Neither Business nor Cricket is a pushover in this land & in these times.
