Million-dollar men

Lofty claims and sinister motivations have been ascribed to the market. But who would have thought it would be such a great healer? On Wednesday 77 top cricketers were up for auction to teams in the Indian Premier League. With Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid, Sehwag and Yuvraj out of the fray because of their “iconic” allocation, Mahendra Singh Dhoni took the largest purse, Rs 6 crore. Andrew Symonds got the second highest bid, Rs 5.4 crore from Hyderabad. With that, one of the ugliest spats in recent cricket became history. IPL is an attempt at one stroke to set up a system of cricket clubs and star power that the football leagues of Europe took decades to incrementally develop. And in this bidding process driven by a player’s ability and marketability, Symonds was told that cricket today really has no place for racism.

The curiosities of the bids are bound to keep the fans chattering. Who’d have thought Ricky Ponting, so dependable in pulling his team through difficult matches, would go for so much less than Symonds? The League, instituted and marketed by the BCCI, is of course a Twenty20 competition, and Test reputations can often count for little. But still, look how Sanath Jayasuriya, always on the verge of retiring at 38, took almost a million dollars.

The idea of top cricketers heeding the auctioneer’s nod may offend the purists. But to think that sport is a pure test of the human spirit is to be in denial. The marketability of cricketers has brought them unequal returns in terms of endorsements and playing contracts. Yet, because national cricket boards tend to be clubby and opaque in their decision-making, distortions exist not just in how cricketers are valued, but also in the opportunities allowed to them to excel. If IPL — and its estranged cousin, the Indian Cricket League — can iron out these distortions, the game can be more true. And entertaining.