Well-Being Australia chairman Mark Tronson, a retired Baptist minister, who was the Australian cricket team chaplain for 17 years to 2000 and then moved sideways to Life After Cricket, claims that one should 'follow the money'.
The term 'follow the money' is a regular phrase, he says, on the television drama 'Law and Order'. The detectives have this phrase in their back pocket, and whenever tracing a murder, the money trail inevitably leads to results in their investigations.
Mark Tronson says that the same applies to the IPL. Franchise holders in the IPL are paying huge sums of money from over $4 million down to $20,000 for cricketers to play in their respective teams.
He goes further and comments that, no one pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for a cricketer unless their homework is thorough. This is a lot more than guess work and looking at results in a score book.
Their investigations go way beyond such niceties, rather, like a corporation, when selecting a corporate employee a wide range of criteria is considered. It's the way its been for several decades and sports such as the IPL are taking the same course.
No one disputes that Test Cricket is a different style of game than Twenty/20 Cricket, but nonetheless, it would be a valuable exercise for Australian Cricket authorities to study carefully the IPL selection model.
Peter Lalor, cricket writer for The Australian recently wrote: "While Adam Gilchrist will get $900,000 because of his legendary status, South Australia's Dan Christian attracted the same amount because he impressed at the Champions League last year. Ironically, Christian isn't considered good enough to make the Australian T20 side."
Clearly, there is a difference between what Australian cricket selectors are thinking and those within the IPL. The Australian selectors seem not to be 'following the money'.
Therefore, as a former cricket chaplain Mark Tronson asks what might be the pastoral issues associated with 'following the money'.
Australian cricket teams (Test, One Day, Twenty/20) require a certain type of cohesion. These are tight knit groups of young men (many of them not so young now), and selectors may take into consideration certain types of personalities working with each other. The senior team members inevitably have something to say about these issues. They can spend 8-10 months together.
The IPL situation is quite different. As Shane Warne recently explained, there are people from different cultures and religions, a microcosm of the world family. The captain's role is to meld those cricketers into a no-yielding fighting unit where each team member has a different set of cultural pre-requites. Moreover, the time allocated for this cohesion is 'immediate'. It is an 8 week drama!
In other words, a national team situation is a very different scenario to the IPL. The agendas have great variance and at the end of the day, the IPL has one and only one scenario. Making money.
Mark Tronson says that churches too have a tendency to "follow the money". It becomes very clear over a short period of time as to which Ministers / Pastors seem to have that uncanny knack of raising monies for missionary and church projects.
