Indian Cricket League (ICL), is an revolutionary club in cricket history to demolish the dirty politics in the Indian cricket board. It is really bringing the more competitive cricket in the country and in the cricket playing nations. Hope it brings more talent players in to spot light and increase the professionalism in cricket
The Indian Cricket League (ICL) is a proposed private cricket league that will run parallel to the existing cricket league managed by Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). The format of ICL will be Twenty20.
History
Zee Telefilms (part of Subhash Chandra promoted Essel Group) bid for the telecast rights of the biggest international cricket event - 2000 World Cup. It was the highest bid. Subhash Chandra again bid for telecast rights again in 2004 and ended up in an inconclusive court battle. Last March, he bid again for the 2006-10 rights and once again lost. His response: the ICL “They denied us the cricket con tent,” says Himanshu Mody, business head of ICL and Zee’s sports channels. “SO, we had to create our own content”. On Zee Telefilms announced that it would be partner with infrastructure major IL&FS to create a new ambitious cricket league, Indian Cricket League (ICL). This league will have a prize money of $ 1 million for the winner. ICL was set up with a Rs. 100 crore (Rs. 1 billion) corpus, and would initially comprise six teams to be expanded to 16 in three years. This will make ICL the richest professional league in the country with an annual prize of $1 million (Rs. 4.4 crore). ICL has already signed a number of major players but is yet to reveal their names. On July 24th, some great international names cropped up such as Brian Lara. The ICL has confirmed that Brian Lara and Inzaman-Ul-Haq has signed up and will be joining the league. However, the Pakistan Cricket Board warned its players to stay away from the league. [4] Imran Farhat though chose to opt out of his Pakistan Central contract to sign with the Indian Cricket League. Former captain of the Pakistan Cricket Team Javed Miandad said he is not able to understand why PCB is not allowing its players to play in the league and even threatened players with a lifetime ban.
League structure
Each team will be coached by a former India player and will comprise four international, two Indian and eight budding domestic players. Essel Group is also planning to set up cricket academies all over the country. BCCI has been assured that it is free to draw from ICL's talent pool. The league will be functional by July-August 2007 and will start with Twenty20 format matches in the run-up to the Twenty20 World Cup in September 2007.
Former international cricketers including Kapil Dev, Tony Greig, Dean Jones and Kiran More have been hired as board members of the Indian Cricket League. The board positions will be paid positions.
2007 season
The inaugural season for the Indian Cricket League will begin in October 2007 with six club teams.
- Six teams of private clubs
- Each team will have a paid mentor, media manager, psychologist, physiotherapist
- US$ 1 million for the winning club team
- Twenty20 format
- Ombudsman will look into grievances of players
Reasons for creation
Several factors have played a role in formulation of a cricket league which may run in parallel to the current official Indian cricket control body, BCCI.
The "Inverted Pyramid" cricket structure
There is wide disparity in facilities enjoyed by the national team and the several regional ones. This makes the regional players far from finished products when they get a chance to represent the country, hence preventing a huge country like
India
Essel group has sought to capitalise on the disappointment of Indian cricket fans with the poor performance of their cricket team in the World cup and the South African tour prior to that. Indian team's failure in World Cup has led to lower earnings to Cricket broadcasters, advertisers, cricket sponsors and travel & tour operators. These defeats also caused massive disappointment to
The question of 'why can't a nation of 1 billion with millions of cricket players produce even a reasonably competent team' has been hotly debated across newspapers and news channels. One of the answers which has gained wide acceptance is that the BCCI, the cricket control body of
Zee Telefilms desire to create sports content
The league could help the country develop talent, as well as provide lucrative sports programming for Essel Group for Zee Telefilms, which lost out on the rights to broadcast all BCCI-sanctioned cricket matches in India until 2011.
In fact Essel Group had launched Zee Sports earlier with the anticipation of bagging the BCCI telecast rights in 2006. This was followed by Zee acquiring 50 percent in TEN Sports in November 2006 for Rs. 257 crore (Rs. 2.57 billion). This gave the company a few international cricket rights —
Cricket played in
During his battle with BCCI and ESPN Star Sports for the five-year telecast rights in August-September 2004 in the Bombay High Court, Chandra was present every day for the hearings. Despite Zee bidding the highest at $307 million, BCCI and its then president Jagmohan Dalmiya denied him the rights.
The pain of denial has been with Chandra since 2000 when the ICC World Cup rights were sold to NewsCorp’s Global Cricket Corporation (GCC) for $550 million despite Zee bidding the highest at $650 million citing Zee's insufficient sports marketing experience.
In August 2005, Zee again emerged forerunner with a pitch of over $340 million while ESPN Star Sports, the other principal contender, is believed to have offered around $325 million. BCCI took the stance that Zee was not qualified as a specialist broadcaster and refused to consider Zee’s proposal. The matter expectedly went to court and Doordarshan emerged the beneficiary.
Chandra then tried the political route too and supported Sharad Pawar’s candidature as BCCI president against Dalmiya. Pawar emerged victorious but not Chandra. In the last round of bidding in February, last year, it was Nimbus who bagged BCCI’s telecast rights till 2011 for $613 million with Zee trailing at $513 million.
Since there was a Zee-Nimbus alliance before the bidding, media pundits thought Nimbus’ bid was a Zee front. But Nimbus chose to go its own way and launched its own sports network – Neo Sports.
BCCI's Response
The BCCI refused to recognise ICL as a cricket league, and criticised Kiran More and Kapil Dev for joining ICL. Kapil Dev's association with ICL was seen as conflict of interest as he is the current chairman of National Cricket Academy, a BCCI owned cricket facility. As of August 21, 2007 Kapil Dev has been sacked from his NCA post. Subhash Chandra had earlier stated that the ICL will go ahead regardless of the BCCI stance. The International Cricket Council gave a statement through its chief executive, Malcom Speed, that ICC won't recognize ICL unless BCCI recognizes it. ICC looks at ICL as an issue to be sorted out by BCCI.
Faced with the threat of young players joining the ICL, the BCCI jacked up prize money for winners, runner-up and losing semi-finalists across all tournaments. An average domestic cricketer can hope to make around Rs 35,000 per match day from the season of 2007-08: more than double the Rs 16,000 they got in 2005-06. The BCCI has also planned to do away with honorary selectors, who will be paid from September 2008 onwards.
BCCI has started its own international Twenty20 league, with the help of Australian, England & South Africa boards. The league, which will start in October 2008, is called the Champions Twenty20 cricket. The league model is said to be a revolutionary one, on the model of NFL, MLB in
ICL takes BCCI to court
In August 2007, ICL filed a petition against BCCI in the Delhi High Court accusing that BCCI is threatening and intimidating them as well as other state organsiations not affiliated to it and asked the court to stop BCCI from interfering with its attempts to sign up players for its tournaments. It also petitions that the BCCI stop trying to "out-hire" many cricket stadiums in India that are owned by the state governments, in anti-competitive, anti-market behaviour to stop the ICL from using them to play matches.
On August 27, 2007, the Delhi High Court has ruled in favor of ICL. In its ruling, the Delhi High Court has said that players should not suffer in the battle between corporate giants. The court has issued notice to all corporate sponsors, the state cricket associations & the BCCI against terminating contracts of players joining the league.
The Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission (MRTPC) of
Support for the league
ICL has received support from unexpected quarters. There was a fear that lack of infrastructure, like the cricket stadiums, might limit the success of the operation of the league. But, support from various government bodies has boosted the league. It was reported that camps will be held at Mayajaal in Chennai, which is a private resort with good cricket facilities. Indian Railways chief Lalu Prasad has shown his backing by opening all the cricket stadiums controlled by the Indian Railways to the league. Terming ICL as a “good initiative”, Mr. Lalu Prasad has given a statement saying that the BCCI and ICL should, each, come up with a cricket team and play against each other to show who's the best. The government of the Indian state of West Bengal has also agreed to rent its cricket grounds, notably the Eden Gardens, to the league and anybody else.
Future of ICL
It has often been said that the ICL is a challange and/or a rival to the BCCI. Furthermore, it is said that the ICL could overtake the BCCI in terms of revenue or influence within 5-10 years.
In a poll conducted by a leading online cricket website 68.9% of those voted said ICL will do better than BCCI in the coming years, 14.9% said they will work together with ICL having a supportive role, while 16.2% expressed concern that ICL will be a failure.
Cricketers as officials and players for ICL
ICL has planned to involve many former cricket players to run the league. Since, one of the blames against traditional cricketing system, run by BCCI under ICC, is that some crucial official postions in running cricket are not occupied by cricketers, ICL seems to address this.
Former cricket players as officials (Alphabetical Order)
Executive Board
- Dean Jones (Aus)
- Kapil Dev (
- Kiran More (
- Tony Greig (Eng)
Coaches
- Madan Lal (
- Sandeep Patil (
Talent Scouts
- Balwinder Sandhu (
- Bharath Reddy (
- Pranab Roy (
- Rajesh Chauhan (
- Shishir Hattangadi (
Mentors
- Erapalli Prasanna (
Signed up cricket players
ICL, in its quest to sign up about 90 players before the official start of the league in October 2007, has so far signed up many upcoming, current & former cricket players from India, Pakistan, South Africa, etc. There are rumors that other popular current & former players have been approached by the ICL.
Confirmed players (Alphabetical Order)
- Abbas Ali
- Abhijit Shetye
- Abhishek Jhunjhunwala
- Alfred Absolem
- Ali Murtaza
- Ambati Rayudu
- Anirudh Singh
- Avinash Yadav
- Dakshinamoorthy Kumaran
- Deep Dasgupta
- Devendran
- Devishetty Vinay Kumar
- Dheeraj Jadhav
- Dinesh Mongia
- Ganapathi Vignesh
- Hariesh J
- Hemang Badani
- Hemanth Kumar
- Ibrihim Khalil
- Indhrasekhar Reddy
- Ishan Malhatra
- Jai Prakash Yadav
- Karthik Reddy
- Lallu Prasad Yadav
- Manish Sharma
- Mohammad Ibrahim
- Monish Mishra
- Rajesh Sharma
- Ranjeet Khirid
- Raviraj Patil
- Reetinder Sodhi
- Robin Morris
- Rohan Gavaskar
- Sachin Talpade
- Sarabjit Singh
- Satish R
- Shashank Nag
- Shalabh Srivastava
- Shibsagar Singh
- Shreyas Khanolkar
- Sridharan Sriram
- Stuart Binny
- Subhojit Paul
- Subhomoy Das
- Sumit Kalia
- Taduri Prakash Sudhindra
- Thirunavakarasu Kumaran
- Yashpal Singh
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