Who Will Stand Up To IPL?

Modi and co are standing firm.

This is getting ridiculous, now. The BCCI have decreed that they will not let England participate in their Champions League because its counties employ cricketers who have dared to play in the rival ICL.

And it goes without saying which of the BCCI's many tails is wagging this particular dog: the IPL.

Lalit Modi, the grand pooh-bah of that unlovely organisation, has effectively denied English teams a chance to dip their bread in September's $5million gravy.

The two finalists of the current English Twenty20 would have got in, but the BCCI won't have anything to do with any counties who have anything to do with ICL players - that's to say, 15 of the 18 English counties. Even if they drop their ICL players for this event!

If only cricket's powerbrokers had been as tough on those who, say, went on pocket-lining rebel tours to South Africa in the eighties.

Or even with Zimbabwe, currently.

But let's not weep too long into the night because, say, Kent don't get a nice little payday from (probably) getting tonked by Western Australia and the Chennai Super Kings.

And there is some small Schadenfreude, I guess, in the way that those original ICL money grabbers - your Shane Bonds, your Andrew Halls, your Justin Kemps - have had to watch in horror as the nag they backed fell further and further behind in the two-horse race, before eventually being shot on the home straight.

But the way the IPL are looking to annihilate the careers of those who dared to sign up with their rivals is simply vindictive.

Having attempted and narrowly failed to basically get them banned from even looking at a cricket ball again for the rest of their natural lives, they are now turning their fire on those who have given them a job.

It is unfair and, in Europe at least, apparently illegal that someone could have their right to work taken away from them by a third party, just because they chose to sell their services to a competitor.

What is this, the British supermarket industry?

The fact remains that the IPL are apparently telling the BCCI exactly what to do and the BCCI are doing it. That is no way to run a railroad, and is leading us all further down a route where the IPL has a total monopoly of what happens in cricket.

I have not yet mentioned the ICC, as it appears that it would be a waste of space to do so. What powers does that organisation actually have?

This latest bit of unchecked bullying of one of its key members suggests: not many.

Alan Tyers