Vaibhav Suryavanshi only makes you feel old. And compared to a 13-year-old Indian batting prodigy, most of us are old. The signing of Suryavanshi by the Rajasthan Royals for £102,000 harvested most of the headline coverage of the recent Indian Premier League auction, and fair enough. The first IPL player born after the release of Friday by Rebecca Black: this is good, shareable content.
On the other hand, Allah Ghazanfar makes you feel both old and useless. The 18-year-old off-spinner, auctioned to Mumbai Indians for £447,000, only took up cricket during the pandemic. I urge you to keep reading that sentence until it makes sense, which it never will. I have a tin of kidney beans in my cupboard that is older than this guy’s cricket career. Apparently Ghazanfar was introduced to the sport by his older brother Atta in 2020. I have open browser tabs that predate that.
Certainly Ghazanfar has all the makings of a potential Twenty20 star. Tall and whirling, with a clutch of variations and the ability to get immense sideways drift on the ball, he has been described by Eoin Morgan as “the next Rashid Khan”. He featured in the under-19 World Cup earlier this year and has already played white-ball cricket for the senior Afghanistan side. This should go well.
At the same time, it’s worth asking: what if it doesn’t? What if an 18-year-old spin bowler relatively new to the sport, living in a foreign country and suddenly thrust into the biggest league in the world, does not prove an instant success? What safety net is there, what protections, what options? What if he gets absolutely collared in his first game? What if he gets injured?
Perhaps the same fate as Prayas Ray Barman, the 16-year-old leg-spinner picked up by Royal Challengers Bangalore for £139,000 in the 2019 auction. He made his debut in that year’s tournament, was destroyed by Jonny Bairstow, went for 56 off his four overs. Never played again. Got a stress fracture of the back. Was discarded at the end of the season and forced to return to college.
Or perhaps the same fate as Ramesh Kumar, signed by Kolkata Knight Riders amid great fanfare in 2022, despite not having played any kind of representative cricket. Still, he was a prolific player on the Punjab tape-ball scene, with the ability to turn the ball both ways and smack it big. The last trace of him on the internet was a video in which Andre Russell is trying to teach him how to catch. He was not retained by KKR and if he’s played any kind of official cricket since, nobody has recorded it.
In one sense, this has never been a better time to be a promising cricketer. The more freakish the better, the more obscure the better, the younger the better. Rest assured, as we speak some kid in glasses is putting your footage from the Outer Spandex T20 Frontier Challenge into his regression analysis. Some lad called Jacob Bethell is playing a Test match for England right now. Good vibes. Good times.
Because this is, or was supposed to be, the era of player power. An unprecedented gold rush of opportunity and democratisation, where you too – yes, you, hurling a tennis ball against an upturned fruit crate on some parched scrubland – could play in one of the many new franchise leagues springing up across the planet. So, how’s that going?
Well, leading English players are threatening to boycott the Hundred over the widening gulfs in opportunities and income. While the top male players in next year’s competition have seen their income rise from £125,000 to £200,000, those in the lowest band will see a salary increase of just £1,000.
At the same time, the England and Wales Cricket Board has banned county red-ball players from taking part in international franchise tournaments that overlap with the domestic season. Meanwhile the eight Hundred franchises are in the process of being sold off to private investors for a projected windfall of about £500m.
It’s worth remembering, of course, that English players are relatively well-protected in comparison to their overseas counterparts, who have no real collective representation and a limited ability to turn down central contracts. For cricketers in the global south, the increasing fragmentation of the world game has created a pure gig economy, an entire stratum of players living contract to contract, still beholden to their board, and yet picking up all their own risk, all their own coaching and fitness expenses, at the whim and winds of whichever billionaire owner might like to throw a few coins at them.
Perhaps the only realistic solution here – as counterintuitive as it feels – is a game increasingly realigned around India, where the top players can command 12-month contracts with security and benefits, where everything else is reimagined as a kind of IPL satellite league. At the very least this would avert some of the cliff edges endemic to the new cricketing economy, where young voguish players get enormous sums thrown at them and withdrawn just as quickly. Sam Curran got an 87% pay cut in the latest IPL auction, which – whatever you think of Curran’s ability – is basically an insane thing to do to a human being.
And obviously, this is how cricket has always been run, a sport built on empire that has never quite been able to shake off its feudal instincts. But let’s call this what it is: a new form of exploitation with a different geographical centre. All over the world, at differing rates, players are learning that cricket’s new dawn is really the oldest tale of all: a game that was always rigged against them. Where a few get rich, and the rest simply fight over the scraps.
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