In a further attempt to make Twenty20 cricket a cash cow like soccer, another blatant name rip off has been announced in the form of the Twenty20 Champions League. The "announcement" wasn't much of one if you ask me. Didn't we already know about this? And considering they didn't even say where it was going to be, I guess all we really found out was that it's actually happening (they weren't bluffing) and that it's happening about the Champions Trophy. This year is truly a year for champions I suppose.
I'm looking forward to it. I only hope that it takes place at a time that I can watch it because as interesting as the IPL seemed to be, it was mostly lost on me because of the hopelessly inaccessible time it was broadcast in Australia. However, considering now I'm in New Zealand, and that there are no kiwi teams in the inaugural Champions League, I wonder how much attention it will really get over here. Perhaps another reason to get Sky TV...
I'll be curious to see how Australia fares, I think the most interesting thing to come from this is that, despite all the big bucks thrown around in the IPL, the eventual winner the Rajasthan Royals was actually a cheap team without big stars. If you look at the Victorian Bushrangers and take the IPL salaries of players like Cameron White, David Hussey, and whatever other stars that played for IPL teams that didn't make the Champions League and so therefore will play for the Vics, and let's say we just slap every other player with the average IPL salary, I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with a theoretically more "expensive" team of stars than the Royals. (Marc you're good with maths and stats, are you able to confirm or deny this?)
2 comments:
I'm on it. Will get back to ya!
In the meantime, this is interesting...
http://content-www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/current/story/352877.html
Money didn't really correlate with success,
It's hard to figure out the average IPL salaries as I can't find out how much the local Indian domestic players were getting.
So, I've used this table:
http://www.rediff.com/cricket/2008/may/20pvi.htm
For those who went in the initial auction, the average price was around $US 500k. Including the other non-auctioned players (like Shaun Marsh who was a steel at $30k), the average comes down to about $US 300k. This is likely to be a high estimate given that I very much doubt the domestic players whose salaries I can't find were anywhere near this.
Now I think that these numbers represent what they would be paid if they played all 14 games - I think, I don't know. This means $21k per game over 14 games.
For the Royals, only:
Mohammad Kaif, $675k
Graeme Smith, $475k
Yusuf Pathan, $475
Shane Warne, $450k
were above the $300k average salary. For the Vics:
David Hussey: $625k
Cameron White: $500k
were the only two above the average. Hodge was the only other vic in the IPL (I think - unless you count Warne himself) and he only got $30k.
So the Royals were probably slightly more expensive.
But.... if the IPL were held in Australia, and the same amounts of money were around, I would expect the Aussie players to be earning much more than they did. The sub-continental players were over priced because they were locals and very popular. The same thing would happen in Aus for Aussie players. This would very likely make the Vics more expensive.
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