The breakaway LIV series can do for golf what the IPL did for cricket, India’s top player Anirban Lahiri has said after joining the lucrative Saudi-backed tour. The new circuit has sparked a bitter split that threatens to tear golf apart. Despite that and the vast financial rewards being offered to lure players away from the more established US PGA and European tours, the defecting Lahiri said that LIV would benefit others along the way too. Lahiri, runner-up at the Players Championship in March, was one of six new recruits - along with world number two Cameron Smith - announced on Tuesday for the LIV Golf Invitational Boston this week. “I look at the Indian Premier League and T20. When it started, I remember the almost vehement opposition it received,” Lahiri told yesterday’s Hindustan Times.   “But it had the potential of changing the way we consumed cricket. “Look at it now. The Board of Control for Cricket in India is laughing all the way to the bank and so are the players. The broadcasters are delighted because they get off-the-chart ratings,” he said. Lahiri said that he was a “big fan” of traditional, five-day Test cricket but that the shorter Twenty20 format that the IPL pioneered was “so much fun”. “LIV can be the IPL of golf,” the 35-year-old world number 92 said. Meanwhile, Australian golf fans may be split over Cameron Smith’s defection to the LIV series but the Saudi-backed circuit could ultimately find fallow ground in a country left to wither by the increasingly dominant US and European tours. World number two Smith, who claimed his first major at the British Open in July, confirmed he had signed with LIV on Tuesday in a coup for the breakaway series spearheaded by his compatriot Greg Norman. It was also a major blow for the US PGA Tour in its battle to retain talent and marketing firepower for an increasingly bruising war against the upstart challenger. There was defence for the 29-year-old, who some feel is being unfairly held to a higher moral standard than the governments, corporates and entertainers who do regular business with the kingdom.  “So it’s fine for farmers, builders, teachers and miners to serenade the Saudis but it’s supposedly heinous for golfers like Smith to do the same?” sports columnist Robert Craddock wrote in News Corp media. With LIV’s enormous signing bonuses and prizemoney on offer, it came as little surprise that Smith in an interview with Golf Digest magazine admitted that his move had been a “business decision”. The series has other attractions for Smith, who said he was relishing the prospect of being able to spend more time in Australia rather than being based almost full-time in the United States.   Australia’s local golf tour is also welcoming the prospect of having Smith and Marc Leishman, another of the country’s top players who joined LIV on Tuesday, playing in its events over the home summer. The US Tour has torn up the cards of LIV series defectors and the DP World Tour has also threatened suspensions but the small Australian circuit, emerging from the economically ruinous Covid period, can ill afford to shun its biggest names. Both of Australia’s biggest events, the Australian Open and PGA Championship, are now co-sanctioned by the DP World Tour but officials have said LIV players will still be welcome to play. “There’s no doubt our fans are looking forward to (seeing) our growing line-up of homegrown stars like Cam Smith (and) Marc Leishman,” PGA of Australia Chairman Rodger Davis said. In the era when Norman was in his pomp, Australia was able to lure the world’s top players to lucrative events but the expansion of the PGA Tour has all but shunted the country off the global calendar. .