Saturday, January 30, 2010

2010 DLF India Premier League T20 Cricket Tournament

DLF India Premier League

      IPL or should we say DLF Indian Premier League, it is the richest T20 tournament currently being played. The person behind this idea is BCCI vice president and now chairmen and the commissioner of the IPL, Mr. Lalit Modi. The first IPL tournament had huge success and changed all parameters of conventional cricket as well as conventional payment system. After Lalit Modi declared concept of IPL in 2008, huge uproar erupted from all sort of cricket committees from many countries. Some of them greeted this new announcement while some of them started saying that this will degrade cricket quality, so we have to stop it now. Many criticizers started criticized that, BCCI is taking losing side but first season proved otherwise.

      First season started on April 18, 2008 and been played for 46 days in which 58 matches were played and one was cancelled due to weather conditions. There were total eight teams competing in that tournament viz. Mumbai Indians, Kolkata Knight Riders, Royal challengers Bangalore, Deccan Chargers, Chennai Super Kings, Kings XI Punjab, Delhi Daredevils and Rajasthan Royals. These team titles were sold to the highest bidder. the Highest bid of all the team was placed by Mukesh Ambani (Reliance group) for any team; he bought Mumbai Indians for almost $111.9. Some of the Indian players were kept as icon for each team, for example Sachin Tendulkar was icon for Mumbai Indians. In first tournament, matches were played using Round Robin method i.e. each team played one match at home and one match away against every other team.

      Auction was conducted for players also. Bids for television rights also broke all records. Sony television bought rights for telecasting at $918 billion and one of the biggest property developer group DLF won the bid for title sponsorship at $50 million. IPL’s second season was moved to South Africa as Indian General Election were also declared at same time and Indian government refused to give security as it would have overloaded them. Now, third season of IPL is scheduled on March 12, 2010 with period of 45 days. In this season, two new teams named as Ahmadabad and Dharamshala have been added and icon status of players have been removed.

No comments: