We wouldn't take the veterans. We would take every single good player for whom the difference of $5 M and $1M per year was worth turning their back on their country (and that's more people than you imagine).
A 6 or 8 month IPL and the revenues would be so staggering we could have a 16 team league and multiply salary caps many times over. Money talks.
This thread has to a significant extent turned into a post-colonial power play. But of course in reality, Shashank Manohar was kept on at the ICC to ensure a compromise, and the negotiation of that is what is occuring behind the scenes.
As this forum goes, I like to think that you and I are good friends. We argue, but for pleasure, and I respect your views and I enjoy what I learn from you.
But I would like to go into some detail to explain why India's financial power is less than it imagines. (Which is good, because it was bad enough when England had too much power in cricket. We don't need another bully in the club).
Consider Australian sport and Australian acting.
It's true that the biggest Aussie actors can make a fortune in Hollywood. Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett earn fortunes.
But young Aussie actors don't base their career plans on that. If you look at Australian TV, Australian theatre and Australian movies, there is a clear economic landscape which owes almost nothing to Hollywood's going rates. If you are a full-time actor in Channel Ten's "Neighbours" - so beloved in England - you earn between $80,000 and $200,000 per year. In Aussie dollars.
The economy works exactly the same in sport.
If you live in Perth, Adelaide or Melbourne as a boy you play Aussie Rules (AFL) in winter and cricket in summer. If you live in Sydney or Brisbane you play Rugby League in winter (NRL) and cricket in summer, unless you go to a private Sydney or Brisbane school in which case you play Rugby Union in winter and cricket in summer.
In general, the same boys excel in both summer and winter sports.
An elite AFL player earns $150,000-$400,000 per year. There are no internationals. There are no overseas TV rights sales.
An elite NRL player earns about the same. There are a minimal number of internationals, and overseas TV rights sales are miniscule.
Their equivalent - a domestic cricketer - earns around $200,000 per year. And might top that up in the Big Bash. International cricketers earn much more - basically Steve Smith, Dave Warner and Mitchell Starc earn around $2 million to $3 million per year, plus IPL money.
But the potentially greater rewards don't actually make the best players choose cricket. Quite the opposite: the most talented boys almost all pick AFL or NRL even though the rewards are less than for international cricketers.
Why is this? Because they are a big fish in their own pond. If you make it in NRL, you are a superstar in every nightclub in your hometown, and everyone is impressed by your fast car and glamorous girlfriends. And you still have dinner with your mum several times each week.
Aussies are incredibly parochial. "We" alone have a basically unlimited visa class allowing us to work in the USA without a Green Card - the E3 visa. Yet hardly anybody uses it.
My point is that if there was a 6 or 8 month IPL, but that playing in it ended your international career -like the ICL did - you would get exactly the same players going as went to the ICL.
You would get the younger players who knew they had no international future. Chris Lynn. Sean Abbott.
You would get the over-30's who knew that time was running out.
But practically nobody would defect because they could earn $10 million instead of $2 million. For the same reason that the best young sportsmen go to AFL or NRL, not cricket. Massive money instead of lots of money isn't that enticing to 20-something year old Aussies.
Offer a talented 22 year old on the margins of the international game $600,000 to play for Australia - which is 3 times as much as his schoolmates in AFL or NRL - or $5 million to go and live in Mumbai and be thrown out of international cricket, and he will take the $600,000.
I emigrated from England to Australia as a junior doctor. I earn around 3 times as much as I would have if I had stayed. But I would earn twice as much - and probably pay $100,000 less tax each year - if I had gone to the USA. Yet even though I visit the USA at least 3 times each year, I wouldn't consider it for a moment. I don't want to leave my culture and I don't need the extra money.
I mean no offence, but people from Third World countries tend to think that everyone would move to somewhere new if they could turn $200,000 per year into $10 million. But people who already have exceedingly comfortable lives actually probably wouldn't.
I'm a 47 year old man. I'd probably be willing to live in Kolkata for a price. But at the age of 25 or even 30, as someone who couldn't even speak the language, no price would have made me set up my primary residence there. Not even $100 million.
