Hello and welcome to Stumped, your regular, weekly intercontinental hit of news, features,
and debate from the quirky world of cricket. I'm Charu Sharma once again in Bangalore. Thankfully
the rain's moved away a bit so golf and tennis are back on the agenda. That's before I run away
to the Saurashtra Premier League in Rajkot, which is going to follow this heavy-duty IPL action.
Hi, it's Jim Maxwell on the road here. I'm about an hour and a half from Melbourne and a place called
Daylesford. A very pretty spar town near the gold fields. And I'm actually in an old railway
carriage that's been converted into accommodation. You can probably tell if you're watching; the roof
of the old carriage, it's still in pretty good nick. Anyway, it's a change of pace, and then
change of environment because it's cool! It's winter outside and it's about eight degrees!
And I'm Alex Hartley. I wish I could say I was here in sunny Manchester, but I'm not.
Obviously it's raining, but it wasn't at the weekend when I was playing for the Thunder
in the Charlotte Edwards cup, and I'll be joining the Welsh Fire in The Hundred.
Alex, I feel sorry about the weather but great to have you on the show! Thanks so much for joining us.
All right let's move on to the first thing on stumped this week. It's crunch time in the Indian
Premier League and what a campaign it has been. From the fabulous achievement, the orange cap
achievements of Jos Buttler who can do no wrong, to the ducks of Virat Kohli, who luckily for RCB
is sort of redeeming himself these days. From the pace of Umran Malik - 157kmph, what a discovery!
To the spin of Yuzvendra Chahal, who now wears the purple cap. Let's pick out some of the highs
and lows of people watching around the world. Now I know Jim, it is rather late in Australia,
you're not particularly fond of T20, yet what's caught your eye? Well, the thing that's caught
my eye is the recurring fickleness of the T20 game. The fact that the new teams in this IPL
have replaced the old strong teams that normally do well. So that must say something about the
quality of the players, obviously. But for me, T20 for all its enjoyment and there's
entertainment, is without that the ficklest form of the game. So, upsets always on the cards.
You know, in India, of course, there's a lot of controversy, a lot of chatter about the IPL.
People seem to be watching very large numbers, except there is a minor controversy about the
ratings which seem to have dipped. Now it is an expanded campaign, so there are more matches and
more time taken for the IPL. But I just wonder if there's a sort of a googly there in terms of
the rating agencies because I believe that the mechanism or the metrics is slightly different.
However, that's been a bit of a dampener because some new media rights are coming up for the next
five years, and if there's a reduction in the ratings, then that could be a bit of trouble.
But the action, I must say has been fantastic, and particularly so because of the relative
success of the two new franchises which does lend some thought to the fact that all the players are
professionals, doesn't really matter which team they play in. But Jim, and then Alex, what is your
thought about the fact that two new franchises can walk into what is a very strong League and
do better than anyone else, Jim? Well, it must come down to the organisation and the
quality of the players. The fact that the IPL can expand without reducing the quality of its
overall output, it says something about the depth of players, certainly in India,
and maybe a couple of old hands that could be shuffled around as we go into this format again
next year. But it's very refreshing, obviously, and let's hope that it can be sustained. I mean,
I'm not sure out of all of this are we seeing the demise of one or two teams as a result?
Or is the competition healthy across the board and all these teams will be around in next year?
Well, I think it's a temporary demise if at all, or just a sort of a shift to the backroom for
Chennai and Mumbai, but I'm sure they'll be back strong because after all, there's a fair amount of
equality in the way that players are distributed. But Alex, you're no stranger to franchise cricket.
So let me ask you the same question differently though. Does it matter which franchise you play for?
Does it matter in terms of performance? Or do you say 'Well, regardless of who I'm playing with,
I'm a professional I'm gonna go and do my job anyway.'? I think some players will have some
loyalty to teams and I think some players in the IPL would have been disappointed had they
have not been picked up by their original team. I mean, can you imagine DJ Bravo not in a CSK shirt?
I don't think he would have been very happy had he not been there. But I guess the more
franchise cricket we see around the world and the more franchise cricket these players play,
when they join a new team and they get picked up by a Lucknow Super Giants,
they have nothing to lose. They have to gel as a team straightaway and they have to just go out
there and kind of show off. They have that freedom to show off. And I guess it's worked for these two
new teams that have come into the IPL, because they've played some fantastic cricket.
Well, just going on to one of the new teams who are already in the final. We're waiting for the big
one this weekend. Hardik Pandya seems to have taken to captaincy, like a duck to water. He's
done very well individually as well, leading from the front for Gujarat Titans, who of course,
won most of the matches in the league stage and are already in the finals. Being a new team,
Jim, that's just, I mean, on the face of it's a phenomenal achievement?
It is. And I hope this can be sustained to the end of the season. But it does show something about the
quality, as I mentioned before, particularly of the local players that they can manage to do
something as strong as this. I was interested in your remarks about television and ratings.
Are you saying that the ratings have suffered as a result of the expansion?
How's that working out in terms of television audience because it's not going to survive without
the big television audience that it's built up since its inception, is it?
Well, not just television, of course, these days Jim, there's a lot of digital viewership as well. Something that
I'm not particularly familiar with, so, I suppose there are different angles of viewership coming
in all the time. But there has been a fair amount of news in India, I wonder if it's floated down to
Australia, or to England about the fact that the ratings have dropped a fairly percentage wise
significantly at 30%, which is massive. But I also believe, or I'm privy to some kind of information
from the ratings agency, that they've changed the metrics, they've taken away some of the free to
air viewership that was also a part of the total viewership. So, it's a little more complicated,
rather than just looking at the face of it, but it will worry, potentially the IPL authorities or the
BCCI authorities, because this new media rights is coming up and they're asking for twice as much as
the previous one for the next five years, which is a massive amount of money. So, this news about the
ratings is not going to be taken very favourably at all. But yet, wherever you go, of course,
it's such a big juggernaut in India, everyone's always talking about and still, it seems to me,
easily the biggest, most powerful sporting property in our part of the world.
It's a busy time for Women's cricket at the moment. We had the Fairbreak Invitational tournament, which
I saw a fair amount of happening out in the Gulf, which was fantastic for players from other parts
of the world who don't normally play cricket, or lot of cricket. And we got the second season of
The Hundred to look forward to in the next few weeks. And of course, the first ever appearance
of cricket at the Commonwealth Games coming up - that should be pretty big. And at the time
we're recording of course, the women's T20 Challenge is ongoing. But will it be the last year ever?
Because there is a lingering suggestion of an inaugural women's IPL next year, we've been
talking about the women's IPL potentially for the next what last four or five years here on Stumped,
but it may actually happen now. Should the women's IPL take off, your thoughts?
Yeah, 100%. I mean we've been seeing it for what seems like a few years now. I think this is the third edition
of the of the Challenger cup and every single year, as females and cricketers, we're quite
disappointed that it's only two teams because we've seen how successful franchise cricket
can be in the women's game with The Hundred, the KSL, the Big Bash out in Australia. We're just
dying for a women's IPL because we know what it will also do for India women's cricket.
It's actually scary the talent that India have in the women's game in their international side,
and what they could have in their domestic side, you know, Smriti Mandhana has come out and said,
'I'm not the best. I'm not the best opening batter that we've got in India. We just haven't found
another one yet.' And with the women's IPL, we'd probably find that within the first year.
Alex, would you be happy to play in it? We say it's not about the money regardless,
and how many teams do you think there should be to begin with?
Yeah, you know the team question is a great question. Because I genuinely don't think it should be 10 like the men. That's a lot
of teams. Maybe if we could start with six and go from there. So, the first year you have six teams,
or could you have eight teams? Who knows? I think 10 is too many, but I think three is not
enough. It's you know, it's really not enough. I'd love to play in the women's IPL you know,
quite often most of my following is from India, and they're always saying 'why are you not here?
Why are you not coming over here?' I don't think I'm good enough. So, if I can't play, I'll commentate.
Alex, please let me make a note of this. Okay, you're in. But yeah, this
three-team thing just to give my views it has been a sort of a force feed, you know, just fit it in,
because there was a clamour to make sure that something was done for the women. It's certainly
sub optimal for sure. I do feel over the years we've been talking about this on Stumped as well.
That the women's IPL has not happened yet because the authorities in India, perhaps for good reason,
feel that the depth is not there yet. So, it's a chicken and egg. Do you do the women's IPL
and then get more people following & more women playing the game? Or do we wait for more women
to reach a certain standard, where there's the potential cynicism, I'm trying to choose my words
with care, the potential cynicism of the standards that we see in the women's IPL is, is not too low,
because we need people to flood in and say, 'wow! It's a spectacular thing' and 'what a
discovery it has been', rather than 'well, you know, I mean, some matches were really poor', and so on and so
forth. So that's what's held the authorities back, according to me, but, Jim, you know,
is there room for women's IPL right now? Because there, there is a fair amount of women's cricket
already happening. And yet, of course, most women, I think Alex would agree, would say that
there are not enough tournaments, not enough competition around the world around the year.
Well, they probably aren't. And there'll be some commercial reality that comes with the
expansion of the women's game. And we've already seen them, the women's BBL in Australia, have
enormous success. So I can't understand why if you're going to have overseas players playing in
the women's IPL, you can't have a few more teams. Okay. Softly, softly make the start, get it going.
Make sure it's viable, and then move on. But at least it's happening. For me, India have been far
too slow in trying to get this going. One of the main reasons that the women's IPL has not taken
off in India is, and this is just my version it's not an official version, is that commercially,
it will not work in that there isn't enough commercial support in India and that it would
be a sort of a losing proposition or not a surplus proposition, which is why they were just taking
the time to wait for the commercial circles to expand. But Alex, do you feel that commercially,
women's cricket is picking up rapidly, not only number matches around the world,
but the sponsorship support, the commercial support, do you think is rushing in?
Yeah, I do. I think you only have to look at the WBBL and the domestic setup that we've got here in
England, where teams have got their own sponsors now because quite often, we jumped on the back
of men's teams. And they'd say, 'right, okay, this is a sponsor for the men's team. And we'll do
the women as well'. But now we've got individual sponsors. Commercially, there are people there.
I played a Thunder game last week and 45,000 people were watching on the live stream. Now if
that doesn't tell me that people are interested, I don't know what will. There's a kind of consensus
around women's cricket in the world that the BCCI are waiting for India to win a world tournament
before starting in IPL and that's our thoughts as players. We often talk about you can't just
win a world tournament without having a really good domestic structure as well, because the
players aren't going to get better and better without playing regular competitive cricket. And
it's one of those things, we want it to happen and it's just waiting for the authorities to catch up.
Next on Stumped why are batters paid more than bowlers? And how is Afghanistan transforming
German cricket? Why does South Africa struggle to produce black Test batsman and how does the
weather impact who wins? Now these are some of the many questions answered in the new book
Crickonomics, which has been authored by leading sports economist Stefan Szymanski who's written
many wonderful books, and an award-winning cricket journalist, Tim Wigmore. I'm delighted to mention
that Tim joins us today on Stumped. Welcome to Stumped Tim. Thanks for joining us. Hi, guys.
Hi guys, thanks for having me. Tim, let's begin with an overall sense of why did you write such
a book and what is it all about? So, Stephen wrote, as you said, in the introduction, he wrote
Soccernomins, which was a really fantastic eye opening book on football, kind of using numbers to see it in a
different light. And we got talking and wanted to do something similar for cricket. There's a lot of
received wisdom and stuff in cricket, so we wanted to see how much that actually stacks up,
how much of it is true. And yeah, with a mixture of numbers and interviews and our own analysis,
try and get some of the big questions shaping the game today from a global perspective.
Well, the whole process of writing a book is really a fascinating journey, so more
on that as we go along. But I'm particularly interested in the chapter on India titled
'an urban sport in a rural country'. More about that Tim? People forget how bad India were.
You probably won't need reminding how bad India were for so long. So, the Indian Test team
basically lost two Tests for every one until 2000. So, they were a pretty
poor team and notoriously very unreliable away from home, especially. And now India we've seen
famously at the GABA last year, India were kind of second/third level and completed an incredible
victory in Australia, and they're basically now invincible. Invincible at home, and you know
they're clearly becoming more and more of a force, and actually trying to understand why that was
the case. So, if you look at where India have got their players, they used to basically rely on only
six states for their players. And so these would produce about three quarters of India's players.
If you weren't from these states, it was very, very difficult to break into the national team.
And so, there's basically a lot of talent that was being wasted, and we see that share has dropped
a lot over time. Now, it's only about half of India's Test players come from the big six states,
half from the rest of the country. So, it's become more meritocratic.
Later in the book, there's a 'case for reparations' section regarding what the future of women s cricket looks like.
I'm interested to know what do you think the future of women's cricket looks like.
For almost every country, the amount of money that they can invest in women's cricket is still linked
to how much money they get for their men's team. So, women's cricket needs to create a system where
funding is not linked. A good example of this is Thailand. Obviously, we've seen the Thai women's
team play at the T20 World Cup in 2020, and their men's team are ranked 60th in the world. So,
the men's team are miles off. It's still a bit of a risk, because their men's team are not very good
and not going to be getting a lot of funding. That impacts their women's team. So, I would argue that
the ICC could be a bit more interventionist here. For example, wouldn't it be great if
the ICC was to fund, say 150 contracts for women's cricketers around the world,
meaning that wherever you were from, if you were good enough you could be a genuine professional,
and countries like Australia, England and India would maybe it could be outside that system,
or we'd talk about their players. It d be a system to ensure the best women s cricketers can
a) be professional, and b) be professional in their own countries. We've seen with Ireland, as case of Kim Garth,
who was a very promising young player. She moved very quickly to Ireland, and she moved to
Australia, basically as a way of improving as a cricketer, and just being professional. That's a
real loss. She'd gone from being one of Ireland's best players and helping to grow the game there,
to being a good state player in Australia. It's not her fault at all, it's the system to blame.
To grow the game around the world, you don't really want that to happen.
Tim, I know the book is out now in late May and it's already a best seller and I wish you the very best on behalf
of Stumped for Crickenomics. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.
That's all we got time for on this week's Stumped on All India Radio. Don't forget you can follow us on Twitter, we're
@BBCWSSport and use #BBCStumped. Check us out on YouTube as well, go to BBC World Service
YouTube. My thanks particularly to Alex Hartley, thank you so much for joining us, Alex this week,
and Jim Maxwell. And to all of you for listening. Speak to you next week. For now, goodbye.