Meanwhile in the West...

For a blog that is barely being read, it seems a bit strange for me to write three posts in a single week, but these wayward kicks (hence the blog name) keep presenting themselves!

Yesterday the West Indies cricket board announced that it would avoid being so overbearing as to block its three best players from staying in India rather than returning home to help the national side fend off Australia. Congratulations Donald Peters (CEO of the West Indies Cricket Board), you have won my bozo of the week. In fact, you have won yourself a nomination for a more significant all time bozo award. In a week that Jeff Fenech announced he was going to come out of retirement, Anthony Mundine scheduled yet another fight against Sam Soliman, and Wayne Carey put himself on the front cover of a tabloid magazine to admit a drug problem and to apologise to the public, in an attempt to slow down his incredible knack of losing all the respect he had about about a month or two ago, Dr. Peters (which has me thinking about entering one of those free instant diploma scams since it clearly does help) wins the cake.

Now that we've got that incredibly irrelevant rant/newsreel out of the way, let's just recap. The Indian Premier League is a franchised competition where independent business buy teams and players for millions of USD, all to play in a month-long Twenty20 carnival. Now of course, you may be thinking to yourself, 'but that's not cricket, I thought that cricket was the only world sport to actually care about its international game rather than just cash!" Stop right there, because the IPL (Indian Premier League) organisers had it all worked out! The IPL will NOT take over international cricket, because all the cricket boards would have to sign a no objection form to clear players to participate, especially during international games! So Dr. Peters, congratulations on making this agreement obsolete, and for being a complete idiot while you're at it. Let's review why he cleared them to play:

One option available to the WICB is to refuse to allow the players to go - they need No Objection Certificates from the board before being allowed to play abroad - but that is a route he does not want to go down. "I have the NOCs for the players, and I have to release the players, but I am not going to not release the players because they would go anyway," he told The Gleaner. "Given the amount of money involved, it certainly destabilises the infrastructure of cricket. It's not fair to the players, and it's not fair to the national teams. But this is capitalism at its best, free market enterprise at its best, and we now instead of crying have to find a way to make it work, so that we win, and they win. But right now we are losing."

Let's sum it up for you Dr. Peters since you've failed to get the message: Tournament rules dictate that no players can play without permission from their board. You don't want your players to play, but you're clearing them anyway because they'll go anyway. Dr. Peters, did you get your business degree at the same place that Wayne Carey got his latest stash?

As for the long term implications, I'm glad to read that Dr. Peters has expressed a desire to rectify this problem, and is aware of it. He must have been partying with Collingwood staff recently, because the Pies know all about complaining about problems that they created themselves. Had the Windies blocked Gayle, Chanderpaul and Sarwan from playing in the middle of the Aussie tour, and the three players decided to go anyway, the IPL would have been forced to either boycott its own rules, or to turn away the players. In the case that they had chosen the former, it would have caused a split of the boards, which would have looked something like India v Every other test nation, because we all know how much international sides of all sports love it when their players threaten to boycott international games for domestic commitments, in which case the ICC would have been forced to take action against the league or players, and the entire problem would have been avoided permanently, because no matter how far the ICC is willing to bend over backwards for India, it's unlikely that they would have opposed a motion where 9 members vote for it and 1 votes against.

Instead, Dr. Peters has opened a Pandora's Box and has sat on his hands while it threatens the very fabrics of international cricket. Oh well, at least when we look back in 20 years' time at the death of test and 50 over cricket, and of international cricket, as an even shorter 10 over match makes Twenty20 look boring and as the Indian Premier League is as even as the English Premier League in soccer where the poorest sides always lose and the 'big 4' win everything, we can at least comfort ourselves with the fact that our cricketers are now making more money than they ever possibly needed. Maybe they'll even donate it to charity. One only wishes that it wasn't up to the players to do that, and instead up to the multi-billionaires living in the middle of overpopulated countries with high poverty and disease, instead of going to a bunch of guys who hit leather balls with willow bats for a living.

Bring on the new world order!