Not Cricket

This is yet another Modi ploy to milk the franchise and the players. By the end of the exercise, players and franchisees would be confirmed BPL.

Som,

Till now we have heard of farmers stuck in a debt trap.. IPL has a wonderful opportunity to start a lenders co-operative society where players can avail of loans at 36% :-)

hahaha... all i can say is the time is ripe... :)

I don't mind the hefty fines one bit. If you have a problem, get on with the bloody game. T20 was supposed to be fast and teams actually have 85 minutes of bowl 20 overs (90 if you include the timeouts) instead of 80 minutes for international games.

SP, it is indeed

Mahek,

Maybe you can read your captain's observations on the fines in today's papers :)

Mahek, it's actually 85 minutes <i>including</i> the two time outs - in other words, the same 80 minutes for the 20 overs.

Jonathan,

welcome to the blog..

thanks for pointing out the correct time allotted to an innings.

I am all against time wasting on the cricket field but somehow the magnitude of the fines seems disproportionate. Gambhir had some valid reasons to offer to Mahek.. Can't find that link but had read it in his syndicated column in Hindustan Times.

cheers

Namya,

I think I've seen the reasons you refer to somewhere. There's definitely some questions to be asked about what sort of time allowance is good for the game (especially when 5 minutes of timeouts is considered ok!), but I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect players to keep to whatever rules are in place (as long as they are not blamed for delays they can't control).

The penalties are another matter... I don't think the ICC makes public the nominal match fees that their fines are based on, but the over rate fines definitely don't go up as much as the IPL ones do for second and third offences.

Jonathan,

One of the basic requirements of T20 when it began was that it was played in the shortest possible time. So no complaints about the expectation to complete an innings in a set time frame.. But factors like noise in the stadium that a captain can't control should be considered while calculating the delay.

My primary concern though was the severity of the financial fines. You can ban a captain but asking him to pay USD 50k and USD 20k for all other players is not on. The punishment is not commensurate with the crime is all that I can say :)

cheers

It would be intereting to see if they maintain their high standards without bias or favour.

SB,

for now Warne doesn't seem to be applied the same rules for dissent :)