2010 Indian Premier League

[Crazysah]

The 2010 Indian Premier League season, abbreviated as IPL 3 or the 2010 IPL, will be the third season of the Indian Premier League, established by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) in 2007. The tournament will be hosted by India and will be played between March 12 and April 25, 2010, and is forecasted to have an estimated television audience of more than 200 million people in India. It will be the first ever cricket tournament which will be broadcast live on YouTube. The final four Matches of IPL 3 will be screened in 3D across Movie halls in India.

Four new venues have been introduced for the third edition of the IPL. The 60-game tournament will feature a third-place playoff between the losing semi-finalists as a qualifier for the Champions League and could also see the induction of ICL players. Cuttack, Navi Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Dharamsala are the new venues, hosting some games of the Deccan Chargers, Mumbai Indians, Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab, respectively. Mumbai will host the opening fixture between defending champions Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders, while both semi-finals will be held in Bangalore. The final games and the third-playoff are to be played at Navi Mumbai and the season will end five days before the World Twenty20 opens in West Indies

Teams;

1. Bangalore Royal Challengers
   
2. Chennai Super Kings
   
3. Deccan Chargers
   
4. Delhi Daredevils
   
5. Kings XI Punjab
   
6. Kolkata Knight Riders
   
7. Mumbai Indians
   
8. Rajasthan Royals
   

So, who are you supporting and who is going to be champions of IPL Season 3?

Crazysah

[Crazysah]

Screening on a PC near you

THE latest instalment of the competition that has sent the cricket world into a spin, the Indian Premier League, begins in Mumbai tonight but fans will be able to follow the tournament in a completely different way.

In a move highlighting the rapidly changing face of sports coverage, the Twenty20 tournament will be streamed live on YouTube.

Sitting at your PC may be one of the few ways cricket aficionados can track the competition - involving players from across the globe - as international news agencies are also apparently carrying through with their plan to boycott the event for the second time in three years in response to stringent media-accreditation guidelines.

The IPL is resolutely trying to control how its tournament is covered - already non-rights-holding TV networks in India have vowed they won't report on the tournament in protest to what they consider as unfair restrictions with the use of match footage.

And the move to sign a deal with YouTube - including the creation an IPL channel (the YouTube deal won't extend to North America) - is part of IPL boss Lalit Modi's grandiose plan to make the competition the ''world's largest sporting league''.

''It's important for us to make sure that the product is available globally. Last year we were averaging 90-odd-million eyeballs. But this year, we've got some great new partners, and we're hoping to hit 150 million eyeballs a day,'' Modi was quoted in an article on the official IPL website this week. ''With YouTube, it allows us to go in and make sure that anybody in the world is able to watch the game of cricket. We want to be the largest sporting event in the world.''

This year's IPL tournament - featuring the likes of Shane Warne, Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Symonds and Matthew Hayden - will not be the first time a sporting event has been streamed online (the tournament can also be seen in Australia on Channel Ten's OneHD), but it represents a significant milestone in new media coverage of sport.

Last October football fans in England were sitting by their PCs rather than heading to their local as the England-Ukraine World Cup qualifier was shown live to subscribers on the internet after the collapse of pay-TV company Setanta.

Lalit Modi's vision of world domination for Indian Premier League

Tonight the Deccan Chargers and the Kolkata Knight Riders will join battle in one of the hottest sporting events in the world. In a country of 1.2 billion people, most of whom are bonkers about cricket, the Indian Premier League (IPL) ? the fast-paced, 20-over version of the game ? is a symbol of everything they want India to become: a true global power.

With its billionaire club owners, international stars and Bollywood swagger, the IPL has become an emblem of their aspirations and an illustration of how the global economy is shifting East. And the father of this new India is considered to be the most powerful man in world cricket; a successor to Gandhi, in Gucci loafers.

Maybe it is the police bodyguard shadowing him, pistol on hip. Maybe it is the two BlackBerrys that he checks constantly and the four sugars that he demands in his tea, with the urgency of an addict. Whatever it is, there is something about Lalit Modi, as he sits in his office above the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, that suggests a reservoir of pressurised energy.

He paints a grand vision: nothing less than the transformation of cricket into a genuinely global sport. It already has the potential to reach two billion people, he claims (half of them in India), but cricket has been stymied by myopic administrators, nepotism, corruption, vested interests, personal fiefdoms and incompetence. Mend these problems, however, and America and China, which for so long have been resistant to cricket?s charms, can be conquered. All that is needed is the right salesman (him), the right product (the IPL) and a belief in the power of the market.

In Mr Modi?s world, fans are consumers, matches are content. The IPL, a competition for eight city-based teams featuring many of the sport?s international stars, is only three years old but already a major part of the calendar. His mission is to make cricket enticing and accessible ? and hence more lucrative. In 2008 he introduced cheerleaders to the game, causing a storm among conservatives; this year he forged a deal with Google and YouTube to show live IPL matches online. ?I see the IPL becoming bigger than the NFL, the NBA, the English Premier League,? he tells The Times with typical grandiloquence.

In person he can radiate a heady cocktail of disarming charm, monumental self-belief and iron will. Or, by many other accounts, he can be horrid. ?How can I put this . . .? are often the first words of acquaintances when asked to give their opinions of Mr Modi. ?They either love him or hate him,? says Kadambari Murali, the sports editor of the Hindustan Times. ?But everybody in India has an opinion about Lalit.?

The idea for the IPL had been gestating ever since Mr Modi was a student in the US, but the real impetus came when he had a cup of tea with a leading sports agent at Wimbledon in July 2007 ? by which time he was the vice-president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the national governing body.

What followed testifies to his powers of organisation. By the time the first ball was bowled nine months later, the tournament had generated $2 billion (?1.3 billion) from the sale of television rights, team franchises and other licences. In 2004, before Mr Modi battled his way on to the Indian cricket board, which owns the IPL, its annual income was probably less than $15 million. In the Modi era cricketers can earn ? pro rata, at least ? sums to rival those of their footballing peers. Last year Andrew Flintoff made $250,000 a week while he was involved in the competition.

From the outset Mr Modi has scandalised the purists, from Mumbai to Antigua to London. The IPL?s 20-over format might allow a match to be wrapped up in the time that it takes to watch a Bollywood movie ? but at the expense of the subtlety and guile that makes Test cricket special, they say.

One pundit compared Mr Modi to a ?modern Charlemagne, with a little touch of Frederick the Great, the Prussian king A. J. P. Taylor called ?a barbarian of genius?.? Others, with less imagination and more venom, have accused him of selling cricket?s soul to make a quick buck.

Mr Modi, however, is unrepentant. ?Either we innovate and bring in new fans, or we don?t innovate and we let the sport die,? he says. The cash generated by the IPL will trickle down, he says. Already, training facilities are being built across India. He promises that the same will happen ? somehow ? as far afield as Britain.

He becomes still more animated when talking about the IPL business model. He describes how he devoted a decade to the research that culminated in the league; how bits were borrowed from every major sports competition in the world. The objective: to avoid the curse of football?s Premier League, a competition that 43 sides have played in but only four have won. ?We didn?t want a Man United or a Chelsea,? he says, explaining how caps on spending in the IPL have been designed to avoid one team owner buying all the top players.

The rule sounds as if it may have been formulated out of a sense of fair play. In fact, Mr Modi freely admits, it exists to maximise television audiences, advertising revenues and merchandise sales.

So does he see himself as the owner of media content, obliged to secure the most lucrative deals, or as a long-term custodian of cricket? ?A custodian,? he replies indignantly, apparently hurt at having been asked. The IPL, he says, is about accruing audiences, not money. Test cricket is not in danger, because the Indian cricket authorities still make more out of Tests and international one-day games than they do out of the new league.

He does, however, believe that Test cricket must evolve. His vision is for a switch to games starting in the afternoon and continuing into the evening under floodlights. You might think such a proposal would receive an icy reception from MCC, the guardians of the cricketing code ? but the fact is that MCC officials appear to be getting behind the Modi way. Lord?s has floodlights and MCC has considered joining a consortium to buy an IPL side.

Indeed, reviewing Mr Modi?s successes so far, it is tempting to assume that the future of the IPL is assured. Certainly India?s standing as cricket?s financial superpower has been confirmed. Doubts still linger, however, over the league?s sustainability ? just as they do over India?s progress to great power status as it struggles to deal with the same problems that Mr Modi has sought to overcome. At least half of the IPL team owners are probably not making profits yet and questions hang over whether the league will prove lucrative in the long term. On Sunday Mr Modi?s efforts to sell two new IPL teams in an auction with a base price of $225 million fell flat.

?The bids that were received were returned without being opened,? he said. He added little else in the way of explanation ? an omission that will increase suspicions that the IPL has fallen short of the money-spinning bonanza that its creator had promised investors.

That may not matter if billionaire team owners are happy to treat IPL sides as trophy assets. But there is a disquieting parallel to be drawn with India as a nation. The country looks to be on a path towards double-digit economic growth. A cushion of domestic demand and low reliance on exports helped it to weather the global economic downturn ? and yet 47 per cent of Indian children are still malnourished.

?Inclusive growth? ? benefiting the underclass as well as the middle class ? is cited as a goal by the ruling Congress Party, but it remains elusive. The second-highest rate of economic expansion by a major country, after China, still conceals all manner of deprivation.

Mr Modi is a famous workaholic, thinking nothing of telephoning a subordinate at 4am. India?s policymakers will have to emulate him if the coming century is truly to belong to all of their countrymen.

[red.]

For anyone in the UK, they're showing the matches on ITV4 for free.

I'll probably be 'supporting' Rajasthan again. Warne = awesome.

[Zoom7000]

Thank goodness for the death of Setanta! IPL live and for FREE on ITV4 and YouTube! Brilliant stuff! I hope Fifa follow suit with the World Cup and stream that via YouTube, would be fantastic!

[Crazysah]

I doubt Fifa would do it as they have already given out the rights for most countries.

IPL on YouTube will be great. It will be delayed by a few seconds but still.. Lets see how good quality wise it is...

[red.]

Well so far from Youtube i'm getting a 'Technical Difficulties' message.

Good start :laugh:

[acnpt]

Caught the end of both matches yesterday on ITV4....might try and watch a full one later in the week.

@red. you can watch it on itv.com/ipl too.

[Dance.]

Mumbai Indians :heart:.

[Crazysah]

Praveen Kumar has taken the first hat-trick of the IPL and Royal Challengers Bangalore are well on their way to victory. They only need 8 more runs!

[Pikey]

Not much on Neowin about the big scandal in the IPL at the moment , although it's been brewing for some months now!

I can't say I'm surprised , I am a big cricket fan , but somehow I always had a sneaky feeling there was a disaster just waiting to happen.

Anything can be bought and sold in the Indian sub continent .. for a price .. and sport is high on the list sadly.

[moris.green]

Finally England surprised everyone by wining the cup. In the final they defeated the mighty Aussies. Cricket truly is an unpredictable game. Anyways congrats to Collinghood and his men.

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