Sell city based franchise for states that are representated. Sell the franchise at a lower cost if you have to. Build revenue streams for future. Make a franchise for Assam, for UP, for Gujarat, etc. Have them play the second division for the first couple of years of you have to.
Expansion is not sustainable if you don't increase the base of players to pick from. Change the overseas players rule. Let teams pick up to seven overseas player. Minimum four Indian players in the eleven per team. In the long run get rid of overseas cap completely.
Increasing overseas players cap can open up the competition for associate nations. Teams might be able to sign up lesser known players from smaller leagues across the world at a lower cost. Let your scouts explore the next hitter from Kenya or the next swing bowler from Scotland.
Increase your soft power by telecasting IPL to more countries. Look at how hard NBA tries to make inroads to India. They made sure when a Satnam Singh became a part of NBA, they sold an entire Netflix documentary over it.
Playing IPL should be the dream of every kid who picks up a cricket bat anywhere in the world. And there should be a way to realize that dream even if his country doesn't have a real cricketing system.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
DC's season has been a prime example of taking your success too seriously. They got lucky to get back into the very first game against KXIP. They played well after that and won games but fitness, fielding, batting order were always a problem.
Hetmeyer was massively under utilized for a player of his potential. KXIP realized their mistake of batting Pooran too low early on and he gave them impetus. DC needed to do the same with Hetmeyer. But success with a winning combination makes you complacent.
And as @Cric_bakchod said on our recent stream, these slow pitches don't suit Stoinis the batsman. Take a lesson from MI. They didn't play Lynn the entire season knowing that he wouldn't thrive on these slower wickets. Of course the MI squad always had better back ups than others
Watched Dhoni's retirement video. Eyes got watery.
Decided it's enough for the night.
Had a drink.
Watched one last time. Eyes got watery again.
That video is not just a tribute to self, it is the story of Indian cricket in last 15 years, and with it the story of my entire youth.
Dhoni never gives away much on what goes on in his head. But may be, just may be, we get a glimpse of how his emotional side works with that final video.
There are more pictures of Dhoni with a teammate, than Dhoni all alone. Athletes have a tendency of making the retirement all about themselves with obligatory thanks to teammates. Dhoni's video was a tribute to his teammates first and a tribute to himself second.
Australia's decline is a classic case of believing in your own hype. They dominated the game comprehensively for two decades and turned a blind eye to how the landscape was changing.
When others were developing mystery spinners, Australian coaches refused to teach doosra in 2009. They believed they can keep churning out a Shane Warne every other year. This is exactly the kind of assumed moral supremacy created the sandpapergate mess. espncricinfo.com/australia/cont…
As sports fans we have this tendency to believe results of lost games could have been favorable if only some selection decisions were taken wisely. Although one can't deny the impact of having the right team, there is seldom reason to believe one man could have overturned a game.
Good teams generally have a squad and a bench that are all equally capable of winning games. Brad Hodge played just 6 tests for Australia and averaged 56. Should he have played more? Yes. Did the mighty Australian team of his era lose games because of his exclusion? No.
Majority in twitter wanted Pujara to play the first Test and believes he could have changed the outcome of that game. But Twitter also wanted Kuldeep ahead on Ashwin. India would have lost by a bigger margin perhaps if not for Ahwin's timely wickets.
Bangladesh 43 all out against West Indies. A few weeks back Afghanistan embarrassed itself against India in their debut Test. These pointless one sided Tests are diluting the quality of the format.
The problem is that we believe Afghanistan or Bangladesh have improved looking at their limited over performances. But these players aren't playing any real first class cricket to improve their Test match skill.
They can compete in home conditions, but away from home they are embarrassing to watch. It's true that most teams struggle away from home now, but at least they manage to compete in sessions. You can't have a contest over 5 days where one time is completely out of it.
I've been binging on interviews of Indian cricketers on youtube recently, past and present. The generation gap between the past and current crop is both striking and fascinating.
We all acknowledge that the current crop of Indian cricketers loves to express themselves, are fearless and irreverent, love to flaunt their desi routes. But beyond than what struck me was their choice of life partners and how they talk about them.
In the past, successful cricketers like Tendulkar and Dravid chose wives who were smart and independent in their own right but they were more inclined towards holding fort at home while the men travelled around the world to play for the country.