Bishen Singh Bedi alleges IPL to be a money laundering platform.
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Bishen Singh Bedi has lashed out at IPL and has termed this mega T20 event as a money laundering platform rather than an extravagant sporting event. Bedi has held IPL responsible for the match fixing scandal and also for the scrutiny BCCI has been facing under the Justice Lodha Committee.
The first day of the mega auctions saw the 8 IPL teams spending a whopping 561.3 crores in total. Bishan Singh Bedi, however, threw caution to winds.
âBut do we know where all this money is coming from and where it is going? If this is not money laundering I donât know what is,â Bedi said on the concluding day of the Kolkata Literary Meet.
Bedi, who has been lashing out on this mega cricketing event for quite a few years now, continued his tirade.
âIPL is also responsible for bringing in somebody called Justice Lodha Commission. I have never known anything so cheap going so expensively. People have accused me that I am maligning IPL as I donât get anything out of it. I said
The most astonishing part of this yearâs IPL has been the money spent on the U-19 players.
Prithvi Shaw went for a staggering 1.2 crores. Whereas his teammates Shubhman Gill and Kamlesh Nagarkoti were sold for a staggering 1.8 and 3.2 crores respectively.
These amounts have been way more than Kohli could have earned at their age.
âYou find a person like Virat who has been retained by 17 crores⌠He deserves it. But in the same dressing room, there will be a youngster who will fetch Rs 10-15 lakh,â said Bedi.
He further added pointing on the spot-fixing scandal of 2013, âNow he will try to catch up with Kohli. Now how does he do it? There are ways and means to do it and there is a platform which encourages you to do it which is match-fixing. IPL is an easy target,â
Bedi who had played for the country under the captaincy of Pataudi, and for whom he has a lot of respect praise, had words of praise for two other former Indian captains.
âMy favorite cricketer was Pataudi. He was the greatest thing that has ever happened to Indian cricket. Besides Pataudi, the other gentleman was Dhoni who never swore on the cricket field.â said the former Indian captain.
âHe (Pataudi) was my first captain and all credit to him as I learned a lot from him. He was the first Indian captain to bring in a fair amount of Indianness in the dressing room. He always used to tell, we are not playing for Maharashtra or Delhi or Bengal. We are playing for India.â said Bedi while describing his time under his former captain.
While everyone has given IPL along with Dhoni and Kohli for team Indiaâs rise in the cricketing world, Bishen feels that the golden era of Indian cricket was under the captaincy of former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly.
Bedi concluded the meet saying, âThe golden period of Indian cricket was when Sourav Ganguly was captaining the side. He had at his disposal Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, and Laxman,âÂ
