Paul Hogan, a Golden Globe-winning Australian actor and comedian, once said, "Cricket needs brightening up a bit. My solution is to let players drink at the beginning of the game, not after. It always works in our picnic matches." Hogan's tongue-in-cheek remark was aimed at the dull and drab five-day affair that is also known as Test Match in cricket. Hogan, however, need not have worried. For, cricket, which was losing out on the popularity quotient to shorter duration sports such as football and Formula One, has found its niche in Twenty20 (T20). And come April 18, 2008, the cricket fans all over the world will be toasted to the inaugural season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) which will showcase 59 T20 matches, spread across 44 days, providing 177 hours of live entertainment to in-stadium spectators and national and international TV audience.
The IPL, which was unveiled on September 14, 2007 by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), is said to be the brainchild of the incumbent BCCI Vice-President Lalit Modi. Cricketing folklore has it that Lalit Modi floated the idea of having a domestic cricket league—on the lines of the English Premier League (EPL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) league—way back in 1996, but the BCCI was not enthusiastic about the idea as it felt that such a league would run counter to the zonal system of domestic cricket, which includes the Ranji and Duleep trophy matches. It remained an idea whose time had not come. Ironically, it was the Subhash Chandra-led Essel/Zee Group's launching of a rival cricket league in April 2007 that opened the BCCI's eyes to the potential of Modi's idea. |
