The Forbes magazine has named Indian cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni as the top earning cricketer in the world last year. Forbes said that Dhoni earns $8 million in endorsements, from the brands like Reebok, General Electric and Pepsi, and the rest from his cricket salary and fees.
With its deep-pocketed owners and global appeal, the Indian Premier League (IPL) has shaken up professional cricket, luring top players from five continents with paychecks as big as $111,000 per three-hour match. That’s a stunning sum in a sport where domestic leagues have traditionally been an afterthought to the international version of the game.
While cricket is one of the most popular sports in the world (it’s played competitively in more than 100 countries), before the IPL launched last year, no domestic league was truly run as a business. But with IPL teams now paying top players as much as $1.55 million for just a five week season, versus $500,000 to $1 million, depending on the country, for an almost year-long slate of national team games, cricket is in the midst of a dramatic shift. More:
[Graphic: HT]
Sourav Ganguly is dropped from the Rest of India team announced for the Irani Trophy. Indian batting legends can’t go on forever. But how they go is what matters, says The Indian Express
Sourav Ganguly was not in the line-up announced for the Irani Trophy, the traditional start to the domestic first-class and Test season. Endless analysis followed, in the manner in which it does in this cricket-crazy country, of whether it meant that Ganguly had been dropped from the Test team as well; whether, if so, it was fair; and whether, if dropped, Ganguly is capable of making another remarkable comeback. Other star players have been dropped, Yuvraj Singh among them, but their fate is not being obsessively discussed — not just because none of them has yet made the lasting contribution to the sport that Ganguly has, but that nobody fears that their international career is one missed Test away from being a memory.
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For a timeline on Ganguly’s career by NDTV click here.
As Virat Kohli and his team of U19 champs savour their sweet victory, spare a thought for the colts of 2000 who won a World Cup seven years ago. While Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif are still in the reckoning, who remembers others like Ritender Sodhi (man of the match in the 2000 final) and Ajay Ratra, asks Anand Vasu in Hindustan Times.
Yuvraj Singh
Of the class of 2000, he is the only player has escaped the ravages of time and grown in stature enough to be called a permanent fixture in the Indian team. Even he, recently appointed vice-captain to Mahendra Singh Dhoni for ODIs is not entirely sure of a place in the Test team. It’s been a career of ups and down for Yuvraj, but his audacious talent has shone through often enough to always keep him in the reckoning. It still bothers him, though, that in eight years of international cricket he has played just 22 Tests in comparison to 203 ODIs.
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