Indian Cricket League vs Indian Premier League

First of all, what the hell are these two? IPL - Indian Premier League, official Twenty20 league of the BCCI. ICL - Indian Cricket League, backed by the Essel group and not recognized by the BCCI or the ICC.
It is now reported that Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Stephen Fleming have all signed up to the IPL for significantly less amounts as compared to what the ICL was offering.
The IPL is based on the US NBA franchise model where each team pays the BCCI a fee to participate in the league. The BCCI in turn gives access to shared revenues and the right to exploit exclusive revenue streams.
The winner of the league will then play in the Champions League which comprises of teams from Australia, England, India and South Africa. The inaugural tournament for the Champions League has been slated for October 2008. This is also the first time that domestic teams from different countries will officially participate against one another. The top two teams from each country will play against one another.
As per information obtained from Cricinfo.com the overall prize money for the Twenty20 Champions League will be $5 million, the winners taking home $2 million. There will be $3 million up for grabs in the IPL. By contrast, the winners of the ICC World Cup in the Caribbean took home $1 million; the team that wins the current ICC World Twenty20 will take home half of that. That is a lot of money we are talking about.

I am no die hard backer of ICL. I mean I don’t really care whether its IPL or ICL, as long as I get my 3-4 month season of quality cricket without patriotic pretensions and at my preferred times - late evening every other day and weekend afternoons. I also want to experience the stadium atmosphere once in a while with family, the noise and crowd thrills.
So, will IPL provide us all that? I am still not sure. Here are my apprehensions:
The meaningless internationals are not going away. whats the point in playing these 5 or 7 match one day internationals when you can get to watch quality players from multiple nations every other evening via a rich domestic league?
I don’t see any steps yet to cut other domestic tournaments to a) make space for IPL, and b) make IPL/ICL little exclusive as far as watching players in action is concerned.
I don’t see anything on the ground yet to tell me that I will get my quality stadium experience, you know, without the dirty chairs, stinking urinals and ticketing nightmares.
Last and most important, BCCI’s monopoly and opacity on cricket has denied us, the paying (we pay by time, sitting next to TV) public, quality cricket-entertainment for decades. I don’t see anything that tells me that either the monopoly or non-transparency is going to go away.
That last point there is the most important one. Is BCCI a money making body, or a public body? It must do certain things to earn the good faith we put in it to run the cricket affairs in our country, and one of those is transparency in its operations and accounts. Otherwise, who is to say that a bunch of businessmen and politicians wont use IPL etc to make their personal fortunes?
Let us keep watching. IPL or ICL, I just cant wait for the day when I will have better choices than Saas-Bahu skirmishes, cheap stings or millionth re-run of 1983 and 1985 Cup Finals on prime time TV :)

My Favorite cricket Star

Virender Sehwag
A man and his bat carry the hopes of a nation

When N.A. Sharma, a coach at a government-sponsored cricket center on the outskirts of the Indian capital of New Delhi, first met Virender Sehwag, he found little that impressed him. Sehwag was a 13-year-old local boy, son of a grain hawker, who lived in a house stuffed with siblings, uncles, aunts and 16 cousins. He had no dazzling skills—but was desperate to learn. Sharma was bowling to Sehwag one afternoon when dusk fell, and the coach suggested they call it a day. Sehwag refused: he wanted to perfect his stroke. "The other boys were sitting on the side gossiping," Sharma recalls, "but here was Sehwag, still batting. From that day onward, I told the other boys: 'Virender is going to play big cricket.'"
Cricket is India's national passion; Sehwag its latest object of hope and adoration. As a batsman, the 29-year-old is aggressive, graceful and, when he's on his game, outright dazzling. In a one-day match against New Zealand in 2001, he hit 100 runs off 69 balls—the second-fastest century by an Indian in history. The most striking feature of his batting is the ease with which he dispatches balls all around the wicket—the sign of a natural shotmaker. That talent is obvious to all Indians, including teammate and legend, Sachin Tendulkar, whom Sehwag idolizes and imitates.
To India's impoverished youth, Sehwag is the man of clay astride the mountain of the gods. Most of India's cricket heroes have come from affluent or middle-class backgrounds, gone to private schools and learned English and other gentlemanly ways. Sehwag was lucky his parents could afford the $3 a month for cricket training. His family didn't have high hopes: his grandmother used to call him bholi, an endearment for a good-natured simpleton. That simpleton is now a jet-setter. Invited into the cockpit of a jumbo jet on a recent flight from New Delhi to Bombay, Sehwag gazed at the gleaming dials and the skyline of Bombay coming into view and whispered: "If I wasn't a cricketer, I would never have been able to see this."
Between matches, Sehwag makes thousands of dollars a day shooting advertisements for multinational brands, including Coca-Cola, Samsung and Johnson & Johnson. The first sports jacket he ever donned was the blue blazer of the national cricket team. Today, Sehwag is a pitchman for Mayur Suitings, a giant textile manufacturer, and he owns a closet full of tailored suits. During a recent photo shoot in New Delhi for Mayur's catalogue Sehwag poses in two dozen outfits, and the photographer goes through a bagful of film, but the cricketer is ever cool, raising his eyes to the camera as if he's staring down a bowler on the pitch. "He's so sweet," coos the makeup artist.
Sehwag plans to trade in his Honda City for a red Mercedes convertible and buy his family a $500,000 home in New Delhi's posh Defence Colony. But he doesn't hide the apron strings endearingly attached to his cricketer's blazer. Sehwag calls his mother after every match, a habit memorialized in a cell-phone advertisement run on Indian television during the recent International Cricket Council's 2003 World Cup. He wears a gold Shiva medallion bought by her "for safety," he says, and his favorite dessert is still her homemade custard. Does his mother worry that her famous son will get caught up in the vacuous swirl of India's élite? "No," she says, sipping tea in her living room, a wall of Sehwag's trophies looming behind her. Sehwag is married to Aarti and now the couple is the proud parents of a baby boy.

Occasionally, Sehwag goes back to his old neighborhood of Najafgarh on the outskirts of New Delhi, distributes some pocket money to the local boys, instructs them in square cuts and backfoot punches, and lets them in on the key to his success. "I didn't have any connections," he lectures. "I just worked hard and played well. If you are talented, you will definitely get a chance."
On a recent afternoon in Najafgarh, school has let out, and on both sides of a dusty, pot-holed road, boys in gray slacks and frayed navy-blue sweaters are running past piles of discarded tires and skipping over spiny-haired pigs. They're playing cricket, of course, and for these prepubescents hoping to find a way out of hardscrabble lives, there is only one role model. "Sehwag played on this spot," says scrawny 12-year-old Deepak, tapping his bat on the uneven dirt wicket. "If Virender Sehwag can make it from here," he says, "so can I."

The IPL Fever Catches on........Me!!!!!!!

Hello friends, you might be thinking I have gone missingh since the time I made the blog. well, you see I am a busy man. Well jokes apart, I was actually busy entertaining myself with the godfather of all entertainment........the IPL, what else. I have no qualms in admitting in that I am a complete cricket buff and for me there is nothing better to do than to lounge the whole day in front of the TV screen and cheer for this lovely game. The T-20 matches as the twenty twenty format is commonly known among all other things have saved me from a lot of thrashings and snide remarks that my mom never fails to give whenever i utilise my time best by watching cricket. Well the IPL is the actual entertainer. It not only has satisfied my quota of cricket for at least two months it is also the perfect mix of excitement, entertainment fun, glamour, and nerve wrecking climaxes. After all what more could a cricket buff ask for when all the big heroes of the game come together on the same platform for the ultimate war of the warriors!!!!! stay tuned to get amazing and unique information on the game and the IPL off course.