Stewart calls for cut-off date after Surrey lose Curran to IPL
Surrey director of cricket Alec Stewart wants a cutoff date for county players to join the Indian Premier League (IPL) after losing seamer Tom Curran to the Twenty20 tournament just days before the start of their championship campaign.
Curran went unsold in February’s auction but Kolkata Knight Riders recruited him for around US$247,000 (Dh907,000) to replace injured Australian bowler Mitchell Starc.
Yorkshire suffered a double blow with the similar late departures of David Willey and Liam Plunkett. “It’s far from ideal losing Tom so late,” former England captain Stewart was quoted as saying by ESPNCricinfo.
“I hope in time this will be looked at. The IPL is not going anywhere; I understand players wanting to be part of it because, one, it’s a good competition and, second, it helps your bank balance.
“The problem is when you get the phone calls I got for Tom, and Martyn Moxon [Yorkshire’s director of cricket] got for Willey and Plunkett, your planning goes out of the window.”
The readiness of county players ahead of the English season makes them prime IPL targets to replace injured players in the lucrative Twenty20 league and Stewart suggested that a fixed final recruitment date would help resolve the issue.
“All I think needs to be looked at is a cut-off, ideally a month before the championship starts,” he said.
“If you get picked up in the auction, that’s fine – it’s at the end of February, so that’s six or seven weeks before the start of the season.
“Then everyone knows that there’s a three- or four-week window, but once that has gone, you can’t then go and play [in the IPL].”
Stewart also demanded a redistribution of the money the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) receives for allowing players to take part in IPL. “We have discovered that the ECB have been receiving 10 per cent of the overall contract a player gets from IPL for a number of years and this year it is 20 per cent,” he said.
“Should the ECB be keeping that? Or should that money come back to the county, who are the ones who miss out?
“I personally believe all that money should come back to the county if you are not an ECB-contracted player because of the money that has been invested.”