INDIAN PREMIER LEAGUE
Wednesday, 7th November, 2007
ON September 13, BCCI announced the birth of IPL, a multi- million dollar Twenty 20 league. With total prize money of three million dollars the BCCI, vice president Lalit Modi, the man responsible for this venture said that it is to revitalize and raise the profile of domestic cricket. Although it a show of strength that could browbeat any rival initiative like ICL
IPL, a baby of world’s richest cricket controlling body BCCI, attracted many former and playing legends of the game. Adding a touch of glamour and celebrity value to the event was the presence of India stars Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble and Australian pace legend Glenn McGrath and former New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming. Retired Australian spin wizard Shane Warne confirmed his joining of the IPL in a video conference from London, saying he was excited and looking forward to coming to India for the League.
The IPL will be an eight-team league based on metropolitan cities though the exact cities and the venues of the competition were yet to be finalised. It will be structured on ”franchise model” like the English Premier League. Franchisees will own clubs/teams by paying a fee to the franchisor, which is the BCCI. The franchisees will bid for players but Modi later said a player may not join a highest bidder but join a team of his choice.
Niranjan Shah
”There will be 16 players in each team which may have two to three foreign players, at least four under 21 players and a minimum four cricketers from the catchment area,” Modi said in his presentation. The eight teams will be divided into two divisions and they will play on a home and away basis with the other seven teams making the total number of matches to 59 to be played in 44 days.
The International League which is slated to be held in October next year, initially among eight teams — winners and runners-up team from India, Australia, South Africa and England — will have two divisions of four each.
Fifteen matches –12 group league matches, two semi-finals and a final — will be played in nine days. The winners of the international league will get a whopping two million dollar while the runners-up will pocket one million. The two losing semi-finalists will be richer by five lakh dollars each while the remaining four particpating teams will get 250,000 dollars each.
Its final leg will be called ‘Champions Twenty20 League’ and all the finalists from across the World will play in this Champions League. The champion team in the Champions Twenty20 league will get $5 million, highest ever for a cricket event. The league will be run by separate Governing body which will independently manage the affairs of the IPL, which comprises I.S. Bindra, Chirayu Ameen, Arun Jaitly, Rajeev Shukla, MAK Pataudi, Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri and Lalit Modi as their members. The integration of accounts of IPL will be done on annual basis. There will be separate office for the IPL at the MCA’s newly constructed Cricket House.
All these things will be run under the rules and regulations of BCCI. There are certain mandatory guidelines for the franchisees to follow:
- Clubs (Franchisee) should have their home ground
- Each club can have a maximum pool of 16 players
- Clubs must have four Under-21 youth players in their Pool of 16
- Four players must belong to the territory where club was located or instituted
- Each foreign player will be named ‘designated player’ and will be purchased through open bidding among the clubs for their next season
- All the matches will be played under floodlights
- An Inter and Intra division should be played among the said clubs
Intra division matches would be played on weekends while inter division matches will be played on weekdays. The clubs will be formed by the BCCI and the franchisees have to pay the Board to form a club. There will be two divisions for the franchisees namely South and North. All the franchisees will be given territorial exclusivity so that nobody can interfere in their own area regarding player’s registration etc. The last but not the least as all the matches will be played under the rules and regulations of ICC.
This apparent change of heart, formation of IPL, had nothing to do with Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s young Team India winning the inaugural Twenty20 world championships in South Africa in September, an event Indian officials once strongly opposed.
It had everything to do with the unveiling in May of the unofficial multi-million-dollar so-called rebel Indian Cricket League (ICL), bankrolled by the country’s largest media group, Zee Telefilms. A rattled BCCI banned cricketers signing up to the ICL from representing the country, forcing the rebel body to file an ongoing case challenging the BCCI’s monopoly over the sport.
