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 :)
No comments:
Post a Comment