Is big money good for young players?

Ensuring more wealth and popularizing the snazzy Twenty20 format are no doubt important in this era, but the challenge for cricket administrators is to ensure that the game is not diluted hereon.

Make money your God and it is very likely to plague you like the devil. By converting the shortest and newest version of the game into the focal point with little restrictions on nationalities and age, chutzpah has been added at the risk of making it the main driver of cricket.

There is no doubt that T20 promises a thrill every minute and is the only form that promises to spread the game further in a competitive world, but it can not expect to add to the skills of players. It is a universally acknowledged fact that adapting to a shorter version of the game is far easier and that longer formats help form the base.

The kind of money that young Indian players will get in the IPL was unheard of before. Ishant Sharma, R.P. Singh, Manoj Tiwari and the lot will pile up the cash, but will do little to enhance their skills as good all-round players. Ishant, who was playing school cricket just a couple of seasons back, has been calculated to get as much as Rupees one lakh per legitimate delivery in the IPL. Still at the learning stage, will he become a better bowler because of that?

Cricket Boards will have to be wary of exposing promising players to this form, or at least ensure a better coaching and recovery system in a cramped international schedule. A team like India should ideally identify some players for this game while handling their Test prospects with kid gloves.

Australian players like Brad Haddin and Mitchell Johnson shunned the IPL because they wanted to concentrate on the more traditional forms and become better players. In contrast, the Indian media and administrators keep harping on the money that the IPL is promising players, not realising that most young players who went under the hammer were Indians.