Paran Balakrishnan: Cricketing world hit for six

Once upon a time the greatest dream of any Indian cricketer was to spend the summer playing with an English county team, getting a taste of pace bowling and walking on the field with big hitters from around the world.

Now many of the world's top cricketers will be picking up their kit and converging on the subcontinent for 45 days a year. They'll brave the Indian summer and the other attendant dangers of living in this part of the world, like the much-feared Delhi Belly. They'll learn to drink only bottled water and avoid raw food if they want to stay healthy - yep, that means no salads.

In the past week we've just watched the cricketing world being turned topsy-turvy in front of our eyes. When it comes to cricket, India is the global superpower and it has just underlined its world dominance in a torrential shower of dollars.

The new cricketing global order was born at a brash and glitzy auction that promises to change the world of cricket irrevocably. You may not like the idea of putting a price tag on cricketers but look at it for a moment just in monetary terms.


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AdvertisementThree companies each bid over US$100 million ($124 million) to own teams in the new Indian Premier League (IPL) that will play Twenty20 matches for 45 days annually. Sony Entertainment, deciding it had to be on the field for this one, dug deep into its pockets and offered US$1.06 billion for the TV rights. These deals will run for a decade.

All this has just added to the sizeable wealth of the Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI). The BCCI is now so rich it's ready to out-tackle football's giants like Manchester United and Real Madrid.

The man who turned the BCCI into a powerful money-machine is an unusual figure who sometimes seems almost out of place in the sports world. Lalit Modi is a tycoon turned sports administrator who hasn't played cricket since the days when he was a schoolboy.

He learned about sports marketing when he lived in the US and the influence shows. He became a BCCI vice-president two years ago and since then he has focused on how to squeeze out more cash for the organisation. He now also has a second role at the BCCI: he's the IPL's commissioner.

Modi brought together an unbeatable combination of India's two loves - movies and cricket. So you had movie superstar Shah Rukh Khan as a team owner bidding for cricketers like India's one-day captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni.


Into this heady cocktail Modi also threw in some of India's richest industrialists like Mukesh Ambani, the billionaire who controls Reliance Industries, and Vijay Mallya, the flamboyant tycoon who runs a liquor-to-airline conglomerate. Ambani has bought Mumbai's cricket team and Mallya is the moneybags who'll guide the stroke-play in Bangalore.
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