IPL Buzz !!!

After Indian cricket team being crowned as champions of inaugural T20 world cup, there is a lot of enthusiasm to watch T20 cricket in India. To make revenue from this interest the Indian board BCCI has come up with a Indian Premier League, famously known as IPL based on the lines English Premier League(EPL) and NBA.


Why a format like IPL took a long time in India to implement ? Well, the major reason for this is that Indians follow cricket like religion, relative to any other sport. The traditional cricket i.e. test cricket, majority of times is boring and many a times even after 5 days of contest, there won't be a winner. Also, the one day format(8-10 hr duration), apart from occasional sparks is generally boring. So there wasn't a guarantee of consistent viewership.

In 2003, to increase spectatorship, England came up with an idea of having a 20 over a side contest. The contest twenty-twenty(T20) cricket was a decent success. But the Indian board(BCCI) was a bit skeptical about T20 format and declined to conduct a tournament stating that it is not real cricket. Though, there was a low profile domestic tournament last year but the skepticism persisted.

Things have changed with the success of inaugural T20 world cup in South Africa. A bell rang in Lalit Modi's mind, T20 cricket is a breakthrough product, then why not have a T20 cricket league in India on the lines of EPL ? Then, with the backing the of ICC, Indian Premier League(IPL) was launched in September 2007 and the rest is history.