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Saturday, May 3, 2025

Sport View

Are IPL clubs putting pressure on players?

by

20130126

The con­tro­ver­sy over club ver­sus coun­try seems nev­er end­ing and when you thought that on­ly ap­plied to foot­ball play­ers in this coun­try, well now crick­et has tak­en over and the bat­tle con­tin­ues.

As soon as Kieron Pol­lard smashed a six over mid­wick­et to take T&T to a nine-wick­et vic­to­ry over Guyana at the re­gion­al T20 crick­et tour­na­ment last week, that was mis­sion ac­com­plished and next thing on the minds of the crick­et fans was whether or not he would be there to do the same thing when T&T plays in the Cham­pi­ons League lat­er this year.

There have been calls from lo­cal of­fi­cials for every ef­fort to be made for the play­ers to play for the red, white and black. T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB) di­rec­tor Bal­dath Ma­habir even went on to sug­gest that since this was the last tour­na­ment of its kind for T&T, that an ap­peal be made to the con­science of the IPL club own­ers to have the play­ers rep­re­sent their coun­try.

You see, the is­sue at hand is that T&T has al­ready qual­i­fied for the Cham­pi­ons League. In a few weeks time, the IPL will get off in In­dia and we have five play­ers at­tached to clubs tak­ing part in this tour­na­ment. The men head­ing to IPL are Dwayne Bra­vo, Kieron Pol­lard, Sunil Nar­ine, Samuel Badree and Kevon Coop­er.

Should any­one of their teams qual­i­fy for the Cham­pi­ons League, then a sit­u­a­tion will arise where the play­er will have to choose club or coun­try. At the tour­na­ment in 2012, three play­ers choose club over coun­try. Bra­vo de­cid­ed to go the way of Chen­nai Su­per Kings (but did not play in the end due to in­jury|), Nar­ine played for the IPL cham­pi­ons Kolkata Knight Rid­ers and Pol­lard played for the Mum­bai In­di­ans.

Now an­oth­er sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion could arise this time around. I have in my pos­ses­sion a copy of the con­tract for play­ers tak­ing part in the Cham­pi­ons League.

Sec­tion 2.7 states that the play­er is free to play for their coun­try and there is no sit­u­a­tion where the home board has to buy out any con­tract from an IPL club. The play­ers can play for their coun­try and their coun­try doesn't have to pay their clubs any­thing.

On the oth­er hand, if a play­er de­cides to play for his club, then his home board gets a trans­fer fee of US$150,000. The Hon Min­is­ter of Sport Anil Roberts then made a tremen­dous ef­fort last sea­son to get Pol­lard, Bra­vo and Nar­ine to play for T&T. He went to Cab­i­net and was able to get TT$5M to deal with the three play­ers. Out of this sum, TT$3.3m would have gone to the play­ers be­cause this was what they would have earned by play­ing for the their clubs, and Roberts was left with TT$1.7m to ne­go­ti­ate per­for­mance-based bonus­es for the play­ers.

Well, in the end the play­ers did de­cid­ed to play for their clubs still and this begs the ques­tion, why? There must have been some­thing oth­er than a Cham­pi­ons League con­tract bind­ing the play­ers to their clubs.

Now is the time for the play­ers to come out and tell the pop­u­la­tion what is go­ing on. It seems from my dis­tant view that the IPL teams are pres­sur­ing the play­ers to play for them. I have been to three Cham­pi­ons League tour­na­ments as a jour­nal­ist and have no­ticed very keen­ly the work­ing of this tour­na­ment.

This tour­na­ment is geared to­wards the In­di­an teams, and is of course con­trolled by the Board of Con­trol for Crick­et in In­dia (BC­CI). Imag­ine, af­ter all their ef­forts, the T&T team still has to go through a qual­i­fi­ca­tion phase of the tour­na­ment, while up to the fourth place IPL team gets in–un­be­liev­able. Is this a true Cham­pi­ons League?

Well, in my opin­ion this is just an­oth­er tour­na­ment for In­di­an busi­ness­men to play with their very ex­pen­sive toys and hence they would do every­thing in their pow­er to have the best play­ers play for them. It mat­ters not to them whether a strong T&T team puts in a mag­nif­i­cent show­ing in or­der to spark in­ter­est among youths in the Caribbean. It is all about the IPL, and if you are ever lucky enough to wit­ness the Cham­pi­ons League you would see even the fix­tures are tai­lored to the IPL teams. I guess this is a sit­u­a­tion where mon­ey talks and, well,...you know the rest.

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