Slave trade in Cricket!!!

While the hardcore fans of cricket might disagree with me, I strongly feel that the game of cricket is really overexposed these days. You have one tournament or the other going in some part of the world on a daily basis and the poor cricketers are not even getting ample time to take rest after gruelling matches scheduled one after the other. The sad part is that no one is bothered- the players, the cricket boards and the channels make money and for fans of the game, it is cricket unplugged 24/7. As if all those international tournaments were not enough, the new idea of IPL and ICL have also recently come up. I personally do not have anything against the game or the players but the whole stuff about the auctionining of cricketeers and the various leagues bidding for them was a bit too much for me. Look at the kind of astronomical prices at which the players have been procured by the leagues with the Indian ODI captain hogging the limelight for having the highest bid money on his name. The whole episode took me to the days of slave- trade about which I had read in the past. All the slaves being made to stand in a line and the auctioneer explaining what the slaves were good at and what were their outstanding talents and features. I can really visualise the cricketers standing in a line in front of the bidders like Vijay Mallya, Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta, Mukesh Ambani, Ness Wadia and the rest of them and bidding for getting their favorite players in their league team... Already the world of cricket is tainted enough thanks to the involvement of everyone and everything from bookies to the underworld and the players are pooh- poohed by all and sundry for the astronomical sums of money that they earn from product endorsements. Things have reached a stage where the players themselves are more interested in hogging the limelight than playing a good game so that they can earn enough money in the shortest possible period and make their lives secure. (The comments from the India U- 19 cricket team members bear testimony to this). It is at this juncture that we are planning the league teams with this kind of money. Cricket is definitely moving very close to the situation where the players and the cricket boards have started thinking that they have overgrown the sport itself. This is definitely bad news for genuine fans of the sport, but lets wait and watch where exactly the sport is going to land up after all this fanfare about the star studded league teams...