Osman Samiuddin – Will the IPL swallow international cricket whole?

“They [players] are all adults. So they have to look after their body and just, if they feel that it’s getting a little too much, they can always talk about it and have a break in one or two games. I doubt [if] that will happen but.”

It was a coy little play, all knowing smiles, and for that last sentence, a raised eyebrow too. The franchises have control. India have a little say, and oh, sure, the players… lol, who am I kidding, it’s all the franchises. This being a post-game press conference, there was no chance of taking this conversation any further.

No such restrictions here, though.

Because what we had here was a slightly absurd situation. Here was Rohit Sharma, India captain, revealing that India had given some guidelines to IPL franchises to manage workloads of players India will bank on for their twin challenges this year; IPL franchises where – double-checking notes – Rohit Sharma is captain of Mumbai Indians, one of the most powerful and successful of those franchises. He was wearing the India cap when he said this. Soon he’ll be wearing the Mumbai Indians cap, and then, at an IPL press conference, if we’re lucky, he might be asked to respond to Rohit Sharma, India captain, and who knows, he might explain that India captain Rohit was right to doubt it, and that perhaps he had better be less coy about it next time.

Different cap, different priorities, but same head. Whether it’s Rohit, Mumbai and their India players or another franchise is not as important as what this Black Mirror-esque scene distils – namely a future in which all that might be left is a calendar face-off between ICC events and the IPL.

If at one level this was Rohit (Ind) talking to Rohit (MI), at another it was the BCCI talking to the IPL, all as a subtweet at the ICC. Usually this conversation and tension happens with and to other players and other countries. But now it’s the captain of the game’s richest, biggest member country suggesting that the biggest league in the sport, the second-biggest in all sport, where he captains the most expensive franchise, has an inevitable priority. The ICC can cope with the odd Australian, English or West Indian player missing their tournaments. Indian players, though? Players from the team that, we are forever reminded, remains the reason international cricket is alive?

Consider that across those leagues, Mumbai Indians currently employ 62 different players, Kolkata Knight Riders 56, and Delhi Capitals 60. With 18-man squads in the MLC, and accounting for overlaps, that will be upwards of 70 players. IPL franchises, in other words, employ more players across the world, across the calendar, than any board and its central-contracts pool. Many more. We’re not even counting coaching and support staff.

That window is now two-and-a-half-months wide, though it’s also a bit of a red herring in this discussion. The number of IPL matches will in time increase to nearly 100, but the window itself might not. Not for a while anyway, with monsoons at one end of it and the WPL (another league with IPL involvement) hemming it in from the other.

But that window doesn’t need to expand when the franchises are expanding instead, controlling calendar space wherever they go. And for all that they have already spread, there is more ground to spread upon. Both England and Australia have grappled – flirted? – for years with the idea of IPL investment in their major tournaments. The Hundred is making losses. The BBL has stagnated. IPL franchises are waiting with bated breath. How long before both the ECB and Cricket Australia decide, like the rest of the world, that private equity is the boost their tournaments need?

Once those dominos fall, what’s left? A lopsided, laughably tiny WTC, meaningless white-ball bilaterals and ICC events. In which case, how long before the calendar rationalises itself and squeezes out the bilateral international excess to leave just the IPL, its proxy leagues, and ICC events (which still hold some cachet)? It is only natural that fans will choose and keep alive only what they want, and that the rest of it – some leagues, maybe Tests, maybe international white-ball cricket – will wither away.

Or how long before the BCCI forces that rationalisation on cricket, because, let’s be real now, this does hinge mostly on the good graces/proactivity of the BCCI. This is, after all, actually about control of the game within India, between the BCCI, which owns the IPL, and IPL franchise owners. The former employs Indian players year-round, and the latter employ them for a part of the year but would love to start employing them in their interests elsewhere, where the presence of Indian players can make or break a league. Once this is figured out, the international calendar is dust.

For now the BCCI is either unwilling or unready to make a move, aware of the delicate balance of this moment – that Rohit answer, for example, the one that hints at the unsaid tensions here, has been edited out from the video of the press conference that is up on the BCCI’s site. It is the only answer cut from the entire interaction, as if taking it out might make it stop existing.

Ultimately, it’s hard to sustain the argument that this might be all bad. Not when it gives players greater agency, treats them better and pays them better than ever before. Or when it provides fans a calendar with regularity, consistency and meaning, which they have never had. Nearly 200 years old and international cricket scheduling is still an abstract, as if each of the 12 Full Members arrive at scheduling meetings with their own 1000-piece jigsaws, shrug, throw all their pieces on the floor, pretend the mess represents a giant, completed jigsaw, and walk away, proclaiming it is the new FTP.

At least then it still felt like it was a choice, with inherent risks, and he had to make it. That jeopardy is gone now. It isn’t a choice anymore.