There were many stars who had done extremely well in the previous two editions of the Indian Premier League (IPL), but failed to come good in the IPL 2022, and Sunil Gavaskar, the Indian batting legend feels that more money in IPL is leading to players’ ambitions getting limited.
Gavaskar wrote in his column in Mid-day, about players suffering from the 'second-season' syndrome.
There were multiple players like Ruturaj Gaikwad, Varun Chakravarthy, and Venkatesh Iyer who did well in the IPL 2021, with Gaikwad even winning the Orange cap for most runs for CSK and Iyer helping Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) reach the final with excellent performance with the bat in the UAE leg of IPL 2021.
Considering this, Gavaskar said that in order to pass a true verdict about a player, it is always advised to gauge the cricketer's performances at least across two IPL seasons before lauding them.
"As the IPL comes to its grand finale what have been the gains for Indian cricket? As it happens every year, the IPL has thrown up a few names of whom much can be expected in the future. That said, it's also been seen how many of the first season stars fade away very quickly, proving the old saying 'a flash in the pan' absolutely right. The names are too many to reel off and they include guys who have scored a hundred or taken wickets and scored runs in the knockout stages of the tournament and that's why it is always better to wait till their next season to find out if he is the real thing or just another false dawn," Gavaskar wrote in his column for Mid-Day.
"The second season syndrome hardly spares anybody and if the player can come back after that, then there's a good chance that he will have a good career ahead of him. Of course, many an IPL star remains a T20 specialist and doesn't feature much on the domestic circuit. Many of them are quite happy to do that as they get more money playing the IPL than the domestic circuit and so are quite content to be limited in their ambitions. Once again, these are a fair few so Indian cricket doesn't really gain much from that,” he added.
Furthermore, Gavaskar wrote about how IPL 2022 saw an exciting lineup of fast bowlers making life difficult for batters with the likes of Umran Malik and Lockie Ferguson clocking over 150 kph regularly.
"This time, there's been an exciting batch of speedsters who have made the batsmen duck and weave and got the ball to thud hard into the wicketkeeper’s gloves. True, the pitches have had a fair covering of grass and that has helped them to get the carry that they otherwise wouldn’t have found, but still, the sight of a good fast bowler is probably more exciting than a batting prodigy," he said.
