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Cricketers fail test of national duty New Delhi, May 29 Among these is cricket. But how come? Weren’t we just playing cricket? Well, yes and no. We were playing club cricket, the great money-making formula which keeps everyone happy. We are now talking of REAL cricket, where one national team takes on another. Sadly though, this isn’t making everyone happy. Most unhappy would be the people waiting for the IPL to get over and Test cricket begin, after some ODIs to endure (these people do exist). They were hoping to see the sedate mind games of five-day matches, the intricacies and plots which get rolled over by the juggernaut of instant cricket, where the fast and the furious brutally destroy the romance of the game.
Worse still is the absence of almost all the big names from the squad. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh, Zaheer Khan, Gautam Gambhir, Ashish Nehra. All of them deciding to ‘rest and recuperate’, to spend time with families, to repair old injuries, to deal with new ones, and to nurse, secretly, the ones never declared. We old school people somehow find in hard to digest that and Indian team assignment could even come second to a club commitment. All the players in question could have taken some time off and tried to recover while the IPL was on, but who on earth wants to lose money, or even face the possibility? ‘Real’ money, that is, since the match fees for ODIs and Tests is nothing beyond loose change for these players. Irrespective of what the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) says, there is no doubt that club cricket has come to rule the roost. For how long we do not know, but so long as it exists, there will be absences from India duty. Not that the BCCI can say much really. It is after all the board that pushed this exercise, right into the gap between the World Cup and the other series. So if players get injured, the BCCI has to take some of the blame. If they hide injuries, the BCCI is equally responsible, having allowed the franchisees to buy them at ridiculous rates. Equally, the players need to be showed up for what they are. Largely mercenaries with little concern for anything beyond money. Money will make to walk the walk and talk the talk. Once that is taken care of, they can come out with their list of family commitments and injury lists. And with little worry of being penalised, since it is the parent body which has largely, though tacitly, asked them to choose club over country. An ugly precedent has been set, and it doesn’t look like this is going to get cured. When the disciplinarians are the ones who allow this, it isn’t much of a surprise that the players will exploit the situation. After all, playing for India isn’t the be all and end all of cricket.
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