Of Chris Cairns and Moises Henriques’ surprising exclusion!
The Indian Premier League is a good two months away, but there is already a little buzz around the player transfers and the forthcoming auctions. However, the biggest piece of news coming from the IPL camp is that out of the list of 97 players that had put in their names in the ‘probables’ hat for the auctions, the league has gotten one Chris Cairns out of the list.
And the reason? “For his alleged allegation as we have zero tolerance for this kind of stuff,” as put by succinctly by Lalit Modi. The more interesting bit here is that allegations against the Kiwi all-rounder had come during the unsanctioned, and a rival to the IPL, Indian Cricket League.
Make no mistake, the BCCI must be lauded for not using a line like, “ICL is an unauthorised league and hence, we do not take match-fixing in that league as authentic enough.” After all, fixing a match, is a cricketing crime by itself and whether or not the tournament is authorised should not be a deciding factor here.
However, I have another problem with this decision. And that has to do with the fact that as far as the reports, there was an allegation of match-fixing, which was neither proved, nor proclaimed in the media. The official reason for his ouster from the league then, had been that he had hidden an injury, and continued playing in the league. So, isn’t this a case of using the yardstick of being guilty till proved innocent?
And if at all Cairns – or anyone else – had actually been involved in match-fixing during the Indian Cricket League, it is a mighty surprise that it has not yet come out in the public. Nothing more than rumours have so far! Let’s hope there is more coming our way from this story so that there is a clarity regarding what actually happened for the stakeholders of the game.
Apart from the Cairns saga, the IPL transfer window opened to a very lukewarm response. Till date, not too many transactions have taken place; Owais Shah (originally from Delhi) has been exchanged with Moises Henriques (from Kolkata) whereas Manoj Tiwari, also from Delhi earlier was taken up by Kolkata. While the Tiwari buy-out makes sense given that he is originally from Bengal and will help in building up the brand for the Knight Riders, what is surprising from Kolkata’s point of view is the Henriques was allowed to go for another foreign player.
For one, Henriques is the captain of the New South Wales Blues T20 side in their KFC Big Bash back home, which was very evident in the manner he performed with both, the bat and the ball during the Champions League T20. His all-round skills would have been of utmost utility in the tournament, and one would have almost seen a clamour for buying him out at the auctions. One almost feels that the management has missed out on a trick or two here.
Secondly, one could have understood if the exchange would have taken place in order to free up a slot for the foreign player. In this case, it is a foreign player that has been chosen for Henriques, which means that the Knight Riders will be left with no freed space for anyone extra from the auctions either.
