Two Meaningless Words

By Gulu Ezekiel

The two words you won’t find any more in the professional cricketers’ lexicon are ‘burnout’ and ‘acclimatization.’
In the pre-IPL era (i.e. till 2007), the Federation of International Cricketers Association (FICA) which claims to be the voice of players worldwide (though it has no Asian members) would repeat ‘burnout’ like a mantra. Their complaint was there was far too much international cricket played throughout the year and this was taking a toll on the health and fitness of cricketers, particularly fast bowlers.
The IPL calendar is pretty hectic. This year there will be 59 matches played across South Africa in a span of 39 days. Yet one does not hear a peep out of the players about burnout these days.
The reason of course is that as long as the money is good, the players will be quiet. Who can argue with $600,000 for three games, the amount that was paid to Andrew Flintoff for his truncated IPL season?
As for acclimatization, touring teams in recent years have had a tough time in the opening Test of a series. With sometimes just one week and one warm-up game to prepare them for the alien conditions, the tourists would struggle at the start of a tour.
Now with the IPL however we have a situation where the captain of the West Indies, Chris Gayle will be flying from South Africa to London just 48 hours before the start of the opening Test at Lord’s. All so that he can squeeze in one extra game for his franchise Kolkata Knight Riders and pocket a nice cool sum of money for that one game.
The West Indies cricket board is unhappy with the situation but in the face of player power, they are helpless. It happened last year as well when New Zealand captain Daniel Vettori rushed from New Delhi to London on the eve of the opening Test of the series.
Acclimatization and burnout? All part of cricket history now!

www.sportshero.com (4/5/09)