It is raining money in Cricket!!

I guess most of the Indians and our cricketing counterparts spent all of the week speculating and discussing/arguing the IPL rates and the "market worth" of the players including the ethics (or lack of it) of the same. If this is about the IPL, then there is the poorer cousin in the name of ICL and for me I always considered the issue more of a business issue rather than per say cricket issue. This is more of a David versus Goliath business case study.



Anyway even before I discuss the marketing/autioning of cricketers in IPL, or IPL versus ICL, let me talk about another cricket which is played on a regular basis for last 10 years. We at S7 Software started as Bristol Technology ODC exactly 10 years back (10 years and 2 months to be precise) and we being avid cricket overs and fitness freaks in a way, started playing cricket every Thu evening for couple of hours and we have, even after 10 years hardly have rarely missed a day, come rain or shine or any deadlines :-) Infact we pick/draft the teams and we play against each other and the competition is very fierce and we trade players on a similar fashion of say NFL but once a quarter. But the excitment and the fun is so much you have to experience to feel it.

This practise of playing cricket has not only made us fit, healthy but also very competitive in our IT life and added benefit of Health especially in a time when we keep hearing about lot of health issues, depression mainly among IT folks (infact recently I read an artcile on rediff about Bangalore labelled as Sucicide city with hihest sucicide rate and than too among IT people because of stress); What else do you want if we can kill that stress? :-)

Anyway coming back to Auction, I strongly believe that this is the natural course for any professional and popular sports especially with so much money flowing (see NFL, NBA, etc). One great thing of IPL is that it will remove all this region bias/quota which had to go. I feel this is just the begining and the best is yet to come.

As far as IPL versus ICL, I feel pretty sad about ICL trying to fight against the IPL/BCCI - a huge monster with such cash reserves and this can be ideally termed as David versus Goliath. This is the usual thing that happens when a small innovative business until takes on a big business conglomerate and my the dynamics of the market it is tough for the smaller players to survive the big players onslaught. I guess someone at ICL should read the "The marketing Warfare" and ICL should be ideally lead by a shrewd business guy rather than a cricketing icon. This can be a ideal business school case study on what ICL can do to capsize the IPL, I guess try to be very innovative and patent the idea and do that so that it becomes more popular than IPL- possible but need to be very innovative. IPL/BCCI has lot of issues - ICC hates it because they dont want to give more clout to BCCI, espective boards has to agree, most players wont be available because of clashing series, everything has to be passed to ICC even though India and its business are shelling out all the money, and many more issues. None of these issues are with ICL and if somehow ICL can figure out what is the biggest weakness of ICC/BCCI and try to showcase their strengths based on that and gain popularity - they probably can kill the Goliath. Think ICL think - you might have a chance, play to your strengths!!!

This blog is getting lengthier - let me stop here :-)