VIEW | The two need not clash

Not all of the Indian Premier League's (IPL) twists and thrills have been on the field. The off-field drama has been, at various points, amusing, distracting and entirely unwelcome. And the old argument of club versus country, rearing its head again, falls in the last category. Players with national commitments such as Chris Gayle, Kevin Pietersen, Ravi Bopara and Paul Collingwood have found themselves squeezed for time when it comes to the England-West Indies Test series.The two coaches, John Dyson and Andy Flower, have been openly unhappy about this. And the convenient whipping boy in such situations is, of course, the IPL. In addition, there have been a number of injuries with Zaheer Khan and Andrew Flintoff both coming a cropper while Mahendra Singh Dhoni may have picked up a back niggle. The fact that these involve high-profile players and may impact their respective countries' chances in international fixtures only adds fuel to the fire.
The argument, however, is ill thought out. In various other sports, football being the most obvious example, club and country coexist peacefully for the most part. One commitment does not preclude the other. To pursue this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, should England's county circuit or India's Ranji Trophy be dismantled so as to better preserve players for national duty? The thought is preposterous, and yet the IPL is set up as a straw man. The problem is that cricket as a sport clings to its traditions and the IPL, the brash new kid on the block, is anything but traditional. The attendant glitz, glamour, and above all, cash, lend themselves to easy generalisations about the lure of money subverting players national pride.
The truth is that if the International Cricket Council does the sensible thing and arranges an annual window for the IPL, there is no reason why it should impact a country's national team. And when it comes to individual players, they are adults well capable of deciding for themselves the balance that should be struck between national duties and earning money. If they choose to stay away from the IPL for the national team's sake as many Australians have done this year, so be it. And if they decide, as Gayle has done, that they are capable of handling both, well and good.COUNTERVIEW | Put country first