IPL and the current cricket controversies

After all the laziness and procrastination, I decided to pen down about IPL (Indian Premier League), created by BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) in competition to Subhash Chandra's ICL (Indian Cricket League). What is IPL chasing here? It is MONEY. It is a choice between ICL and IPL for Indian Cricketers a few months back but BCCI as its name suggests controlled all that cricketing action in India. ICL isn't significant anymore and IPL is making all the news. National Media (read North Media) is spending lot of air time talking about whether the players are worth and drawing conclusions on which pack would do best. It is quite evident that there is lot of money and this may become great HISTORY in the world of cricket.

I am of opinion that the ongoing controversies in the CB series involving Andrew Symonds, Harbhajan Singh and Mathew Hayden is very much a conspiracy to market the IPL that is planned to start next month. Is this a good way to sell sports? I think so. Look at what has happened to the sports in United States. Rivalries between teams make the sports very interesting and market forces capitalize that. But, if my theory is true, history would raise hats to BCCI. But, can history prove it? Let us hope not.

Just, look at the facts in brief. Will you not do anything that you think would work in favor when the stakes are so high as this?

Television Rights

On January 14th, 2008, it was announced that a consortium consisting of India's Sony Television network and Singapore-based World Sports Group secured the rights of the Indian Premier League. The record deal has a duration of ten years at a cost of US$1.026 billion. As part of the deal, the consortium will pay the BCCI US$918 million for the telecast rights and US$108 million for the promotion of the tournament.

On the other side, ICL was set up with a US$2.56 million corpus, and with an annual prize of US$1 million.

Let us hope that Test Cricket doesn't die due to this new development.