Read a headline somewhere that said “money has spoilt cricket”, I cannot agree more. With the BCCI openly flaunting that if you have the money, you don’t have to worry about laws and ECB seeking help from fraudsters to compete with BCCI…is it still a gentleman’s game?

The hardcore cricket fan in me is scared of what this will do to test cricket. The empty stands speak for themselves, when you could have the instant coffee, why take the pains to make filter coffee. Even Starbucks is starting to sell coffee, the long held philosophy of freshly brewed drip coffee is partially compromised to good economics. So why should the audience not get done with a game in 3 hours rather than wait 5 days.  While Test cricket is not gone, this does seem to be the beginning of the end.

Is Test cricket the only victim of this battle of the riches? The whole spirit of the game seems to have changed. The fact that some of the Indian cricketing greats would be sidelined because BCCI was insecure of a parallel league, is beyond my level of understanding. What makes it more perplexing is that the rest of the world did not oppose this, but bowed to the financial might of the BCCI. I have nothing against the IPL or any other BCCI events, infact I enjoy watching them, but why should the world be denied the pleasure of watching Shane Bond bowl to Virendra Sehvag just because Lalit Modi has a very large Ego, an even larger bank account and possibly even larger sense of insecurity.

The whole Stanford mess epitomizes the hopeless state of affairs. How bad is the situation when two country cricket boards accept sponsorship without any due diligence, just so they can compete financially with BCCI.

Are we slicing open the hen that lays the golden egg? Is greed overpowering the sportsman spirit? Can 19 year olds earn millions and still keep a cool head and focus on the cricket? The pessimist in me is already imagining the days when cricket news sites will have daily updates on who was arrested, where and doing what. Think that’s not possible, check out www.nfl.com