Finn Allen, The IPL and Invisible Gorillas

Whether you are a fan of the IPL or not, one cannot deny that the tournament is growing bigger each year and has a huge impact on international cricket.

After Josh Philippe pulled out of the IPL due to personal reasons, his IPL squad, RCB brought in 21-year-old Finn Allen as a replacement. The young New Zealand batter has enjoyed an amazing T20 Super Smash season and was instrumental in his team, Firebrands' march to the title.

While it is fabulous news for the young man, there is a downside to his IPL commitment. Allen's call-up to RCB could mean missing out on an international debut, with New Zealand to play Bangladesh in a three-match T20 series from March 28.

RCB play Mumbai Indians in the IPL's opener on April 9.

Finn Allen's situation brings two subject matter to my mind. First, the IPL vs Country and secondly, the impact the IPL season has on international cricket. Looked at from a certain perspective, the two are intertwined.

The first one is pretty straightforward.

Huge Payday

It is undeniable, the IPL is the biggest T20 competition. And because the tournament offers the highest paychecks, it attracts more top talent per squad than any other league. In a way, it is becoming the must-attend tournament for many T20 players.

The obvious benefits of the tournament to players' growth, skill improvement, is bare for everyone to see. Teams have some of the best T20 coaches on board. Players compete against some of the most skilled opponents they can encounter.  Most teams that I have looked at have in place systems that provide environments that encourage knowledge sharing between players themselves.

While many players choose to be coy or put the country first when asked about the potential clash of schedules, Jos Butler was more pragmatic and forthright in his answer when asked by the British media about what he would do should the situation arise. The questions were around the likelihood of him skipping the Test series against New Zealand starting June 2 if their franchises get to the play-offs starting in the last week of May.

"We all know the benefits of IPL. It's a huge tournament and monetary rewards are obvious and also the experience you gain and it has its pluses too," Butler responded. "IPL is advantageous to a lot of people with the money that's involved. It's the biggest tournament in cricket in terms of money and careers can be short..."

The Invisible Gorilla

A number of years ago Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted an experiment. They constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film, which is about a minute long, were instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. The passes were meant to include both the aerial and bounce passes. This task is difficult and completely absorbing.

Immediately after watching the video, the participants were asked how many passes they had counted in total. (The correct number is thirty-five or thirty-four) Anyway, after reporting the number of passes, the participants were asked if they had seen the gorilla that walked across the screen while the basketball was being passed. Most never saw it and were shocked when the video was replayed in slow motion as a person wearing a gorilla suit sauntered by.

The gorilla spends about nine seconds on the screen walking from one end to the other. And even though the participants thought that the purpose of the experiment was to correctly tally the number of passes, it was not. The pass-counting task was intended to keep people engaged in doing something that demanded attention to the action on the screen. The real purpose was to check if people could notice the gorilla while preoccupied with the counting.

The experiment has been conducted in many different forms all over the world, and the results are consistent with those of Chabris and Simons, more than half the participants failed to see the gorilla. "This error of perception results from a lack of attention to an unexpected object, so it goes by the scientific name 'inattentional blindness,'" they wrote.

Inattentional blindness occurs when people devote their attention to a particular area or aspect, and as a result tend not to notice unexpected things or events, even when those unexpected objects are salient, potentially important.

Inattentional Blindness To IPL's Impact?

When you consider the huge payday the IPL provides, and the shortness of an international career (averaging 12 to 15 years for batters and 10 to 12 years for bowlers) you get to understand why it is a major draw for talent. Because of the small window to maximize their abilities, very few players can afford to turn down such a lucrative tournament. Not many are like Tom Brady who could afford to take a pay cut because his spouse is a millionaire. Consider the fortunes of Chris Cairns who had to take up a $17/h job with the Auckland city council to make ends meet. Or Jeet Raval who worked as an accountant in the offseason.

The result is that almost all top international cricketers strive to participate in the event.

The 2021 edition of the IPL boasts 125 players from Test-playing countries and three from Associates. Players from 11 different nations, to be precise. The fact is, most nations will not be with their top T20 players during the IPL.

Therefore, teams are often unable to field their best squads if they have fixtures that clash with the IPL window. This means that teams are less competitive at this point. However, while a case could be made for fringe players getting opportunities, an argument can also be made questioning the purpose of having fringe players compete against each other. Fringe players are best served when they play against the best international talent.

The other consideration would be one around viewership. Because of the level of talent, the IPL boasts, any other cricket matches or competitions that clash with the IPL is destined to play second fiddle in viewership numbers.

At this point, the IPL is the equivalent of basketball's NBA, football's Champions League and a few other high profile competitions. Besides the years when there is the T20 and/or ODI World Cup, the IPL is the biggest cricket event each year. And given its popularity both in India and other countries, the IPL can only grow bigger than it is at the moment.

With this in mind, would international cricket not be best served better by the ICC leaving an "IPL window" in their fixture scheduling? A cricketing showpiece of its size, that impacts national squads to a very huge extent, surely deserves to be treated as such, and not to be taken lightly. But, the fact that the ICC is not taking that kind of action, does that mean that they do not realize the impact or they are just inattentionally blind to it?

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