The Chennai Super Kings signed up 24-year old all-rounder Manpreet Gony of Punjab to replace a injured Sudeep Tyagi for the inaugural Indian Premier League match. Gony comes highly recommended by one of national selectors. Gony a 6 foot 4 tall bowler can bowl with reasonable pace and hits the ball hard. He will fit right in with the team of Chennai Super Kings said the VB Chandrasekhar the chief selector for the IPL Chennai team.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Kolkata Knight Riders Face Fresh Headaches
Shoaib Akhtar has been banned by the PCB for 5 years. His contract with the IPL is in jeapoardy. Shah Rukh Khan and Kolkata Knight Riders have a face problem on hands. Will Akhtar be able to play? According to BCCI rules any player banned by any other board can not play in the IPL. There can not be any exceptions. As of now as Shaoib is still going through the appeal process he can play. But once the ban is finalised then there is no way Shoaib Akhtar can play in the IPL.
DLFIPL - Media may boycott the IPL
BCCI and IPL have claimed sole copyright for all the images and pictures clicked by media persons and journalists during cricket matches. They haved the media organisations to upload all such pictures on to the official website of the IPL. This new clause has made the media organisations to see red. Most newspapers and channels have online editions and not being able to upload the pictures clicked by them on to their websites is a serious handicap for the online editions.
If these petty clauses are not removed the media is planning to boycott the event. Restricting our freedom to report the event as they see it has not endeared the IPL and BCCI to the media organisations.
Rajasthan Royals - The IPL Jaipur Cricket Team
Rajasthan Royals is one of the eight teams that will be part of the inaugural IPL tournament. The eight teams will represent eight cities in India - Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Jaipur, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mohali. Rajasthan Royals will play 14 league stage home and away matches against the seven other teams in the tournament.
The IPL is a brain child of Lalit Modi and Bindra office bearers of BCCI and was launched in September 2007. A closed bidding process revealed the 8 winners. All the winners combined had paid nearly 800 million dollars to own the rights to their teams for the next 10 years. The rights to own the IPL Jaipur cricket team, named the Rajasthan Royals went to Emerging Media, partly owned by Lachlan Murdoch.
The media rights to the IPL tournament matches were bagged by the Sony Entertainment Television and deal was worth over $1 billion dollars for a period of 10 years. DLF will be the title sponsor for the IPL. Other partners include Hero Honda, Kingfisher Airlines and ITC Welcome Group of Hotels. The money from these deals goes into the central revenue pool of the IPL.
Rajasthan Royals will get a equal percentage of revenue from the central revenue pool apart from the money earned from selling tickets, merchandise like Rajasthan Royals branded T-shirts, caps, ball, bats and much more.
The franchise owners for the 8 IPL teams are all are big businesses - like Reliance Retail, United Breweries, India Cements, GMR Holdings, Emerging Media, Red Chillies Entertainment, Deccan Chronicle Group and Bombay Dyeing, Dabur and Apeejay Surendra groups. The high profile buyers include Vijay Mallaya, Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta.
The IPL had contracted over 80 international cricket stars from the different cricket playing countries around the world. These players were assured a basic fee over and above which the franchisees had to bid to secure a particular player from the auction pool. After a hot bidding process that lasted over 10 hours Mahendra Singh Dhoni emerged as the highest paid player and was bagged by the Chennai Super Kings. Andrew Symonds the second highest paid player went to the Hyderabad Deccan Chargers.
The eight teams IPL Jaipur team have been allowed to make up the rest of their teams by buying players from their local areas called the catchement areas and the under-22 players. Hot competition emerged for the newly crowned under-19 world cup winners. But the BCCI stepped in to protect the colts from too much money corrupting their young minds. A cap of $30,000 dollars per player for under-22 players was put in place.
IPL Jaipur team - the Rajasthan Royals will have a theme song, brand ambassdors, logo and team colors.
Shane Warne will be coach and captain of the Rajasthan Royals team.
Friday, March 28, 2008
ICL vs IPL: How about a match?
New Delhi/ Mumbai: They are sworn enemies in Indian cricket. The ICL has been branded as a rebel league, and the BCCI promoted IPL is currently the hottest property in world cricket. But beyond the shrill rhetoric can there be a common meeting ground? CNN-IBN wonders about that possibility.
Even while playing a round of recreational golf, Dean Jones never gave an opponent an inch. So as a member of the ICL executive board, he has the same approach towards the other T20 league that's about to kick off. Here's his message to the IPL:
"Bring it on. If the IPL think they are good enough and they have got the best Twenty20 crop in the world, we do. Bring it on," Jones says.
Here is the idea some are dreaming up. Why don't the leagues stop taking each other on in the media or in legal battles, and instead, how about this: a three-match series between the champions of the ICL versus the champions of the IPL?
"We are running our game, they are running their game. We see no competition. It's just another tournament," says Lalit Modi, Chairman of the IPL.
IPL bosses may laugh it off, but with the so-called rebels having already organised two succesful tournaments they can say what you are about to hear next.
"ICL is already existing, so let IPL play a couple of tournaments. Once they get established, the time will come when people will start saying, 'let's have a match between the two teams,'" says the ICL Chairman Kapil Dev.
It may be the ultimate cricketing fantasy and may not come true anytime soon. But stranger things have happened in this game before.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
IPL: Shane Warne Retires From First-Class Cricket
Too many business interests, too much time spent away from home and IPL. All these have prompted Shane Warne to retire from even first class cricket. He cut his final ties with Hampshire whose team he transformed over the 8 years he was with them. From being a small provincial club Hampshire has become a leading side in English County Cricket and they are deeply debted to Shane Warne for this transformation and sad to see him go.
HE will now concentrate only IPL - where he is playing the role of captain and coach for the Rajasthan Royals team.
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