Rashid Khan: T20 superstar in new cricket landscape
This past December Rashid Khan flew to Australia and took six wickets for the Adelaide Strikers across eight matches in the Big Bash League before then leaving mid-tournament to fly to South Africa and captain the SA20 franchise MI Cape Town in the tournament’s opening match on Tuesday, January 10th.
Rewind a little further and he was turning out for the Trent Rockets in The Hundred in August before then heading mid-tournament to the Asia Cup to play for his nation Afghanistan. After that, he jetted off to the Caribbean to play for St Kitts and Nevis Patriots in the CPL in September.
All that cricket was before he turned out at the Twenty20 (T20) World Cup for his nation in October and November in Australia. The BBL followed soon after that and now the SA20 is underway.
In February, he will join the Lahore Qalandars for the 2023 Pakistan Super League, which runs into March. Then, in late March, Rashid Khan will rejoin defending champions Gujarat Titans for the 2023 IPL - India’s, and the world’s, premier T20 league - the zenith of it all really, at least, financially speaking.
In his career to date, Rashid Khan has also played for many other teams and franchises not mentioned above - Sussex in England, the IPL’s Sunrisers Hyderabad, and the Guyana and Barbados franchises in the CPL. It’s quite a remarkable cricketing CV.
Rashid Khan learned the game as a refugee in Peshawar, Pakistan, after his family crossed the Afghan border following the US invasion - a common narrative of Afghan cricketers.
His rise to prominence came thanks to his emergence into the Afghanistan One Day International (ODI) side as a 17-year-old. His performances for his country scored him his first IPL contract with Sunrisers which led to a CPL contract and the rest followed from there.
These days, Rashid Khan is considered one of the best and most-sought after spin bowlers in limited-overs cricket worldwide. In 2019, he was the first pick in The Hundred’s inaugural draft - proof of his standing in the game.
His story and success are incredible due to the fact that he hasn’t risen out of one of cricket’s traditional talent hubs. What’s more, his career is emblematic of a new type of player fans of short-form cricket are getting used to - the freelance cricketer who jumps from franchise to franchise like a T20 gun for hire.
His pathway is an example of how many cricketers make a living these days and sheds light on how careers in the sport might come to look in the future. This is especially the case for cricketers from nations that cannot offer larger central contracts.
West Indies, South Africa, and New Zealand have become great contributors to this pool of globetrotting players that hop around the world’s leagues. Australia and England had mostly seen players from outside their central contract ranks follow similar routes but now, increasingly, players from inside the central contract circle want a piece of the pie as well.
Talented aspirants from lesser full member states, as well as the so-called ‘associate members’, might look to follow this trend too as they search for pay-days or their big break in the game.
It should be noted, this trajectory has not been commonplace for India’s international players as the IPL and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) have joined forces to prohibit them from playing in other T20 leagues.
However, as IPL teams continue to invest in franchises in other leagues, it has been suggested that might begin to change in the future, probably in a restricted sense to begin with as the IPL safeguard their product and the BCCI protect the quality of their domestic tournaments.
The IPL: Monster or missionary?
In the UAE’s new ILT20 league, which starts tomorrow, three of the six franchises are owned by IPL teams. In the concurrent SA20 already mentioned, all six teams are owned by IPL franchises incredibly. IPL franchises also own three sides in the CPL and have reportedly invested in the USA’s upcoming Major League Cricket, too.
The next frontier for the IPL might even be The Hundred and the BBL if the English or Australian boards can be tempted by a pretty penny. With the way it’s all going, it's foreseeable in the not-so-distant future that the IPL franchises could own and operate almost all the major T20 leagues and teams around the world in a near non-stop T20 travelling circus.
And what then? Well, then we might see players like Rashid Khan going from the Trent Mumbai Indians to the Adelaide Mumbai Indians to the Cape Town Mumbai Indians to the Los Angeles Mumbai Indians and then to the actual Mumbai Indians in a circuit season that could end up consuming most of the cricketing calendar.
By that stage, things like test cricket, or even ODIs and international T20s (T20Is), might become the lesser-watched side-shows to the IPL’s mega-organism main event.
While international cricket will likely hold a firm place in a select few countries for some time - namely, England, Australia and India - burgeoning cricket nations like Afghanistan might suffer as opportunities for them to play tests, ODIs and T20Is could diminish with the shrinking calendar space.
This process might begin to constrict the pathways to international cricket for players such as Rashid Khan and that could present a real danger.
The IPL (or franchise T20 cricket at large) might just get so massive that it begins to consume and ultimately undermine the very sources of its one true major asset: the talent. In that sense, the T20 franchise behemoth could become, ironically, self-cannibalising.
On the other hand, it might also not. We could rather see IPL (or other) franchises breaking new ground by establishing academies and subordinate leagues around the world, potentially accessing all sorts of new markets and new talent with that.
This is something that is already visible. Rajasthan Royals, for example, already operate an academy network across India, the UK and UAE. Who knows, maybe similar networks might grow to reach further corners of the globe and actually expand cricket as a result. It’s hard to know how it will all turn out.
Just as it could be argued, as above, that the rapid expansion of the IPL's operations might be cancerous to cricket in the long run, there are also points to be made in favour of franchise T20 cricket offering opportunities to players that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Just as the IPL and other leagues are gobbling up a certain amount of international cricket’s space, it must be noted that the IPL did, after all, help launch the now multi-national career of Rashid Khan and others like him.
Whatever happens, one thing is for sure, cricket, especially at the professional level, is rapidly changing in front of our eyes and it won’t stop evolving anytime soon.
Let’s just hope, as fans of the game, that we get to see the next Rashid Khan playing to their full potential, and the one after that, and the one after that, wherever they happen to pop up in the big wide world of cricketing talent.
