IPL season to kick-off on Friday

The World Cup triumph is still to sink in but the players are already sweating it out for the ten franchises of the Indian Premier League (IPL). This time, the crowds want to see their heroes going bang-bang in the Twenty20 format.

The revamped and enlarged IPL-IV season kicks off with champions Chennai Super Kings taking on Kolkata Knight Riders on Friday.

It is now settled that Twenty20 is not going to devour the longish 50-50 after the breathtaking World Cup action. The purists can now relax and reassure themselves that the Test cricket can’t be touched.

If the World Cup has breathed fresh life into ODIs, now it is said all three forms of cricket have their relevance and none will upstage the other as long as the International Cricket Council (ICC) creates a level-playing field for all three to coexist.

This will also be the first IPL without its charismatic creator, Lalit Modi, who was sacked amid high drama by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) immediately after the final of the 2010 edition in Navi Mumbai. Modi’s emotional speech at the closing ceremony, even as the board’s bigwigs got ready to hand him a long charge-sheet listing financial irregularities, moved quite a few franchise owners. They still swear by him.

The IPL, now chaired by BCCI vice president and another business tycoon Chirayu Amin, will have two new teams in Sahara Pune Warriors and Kochi Tuskers joining the existing eight. There will be 74 matches played over 51 days with the 10 teams divided in two groups.

The players went under the hammer after the third edition and they found themselves signing for new owners and playing in new colours. A couple of franchises decided to retain their icons and some others went for a complete overhaul of their line-ups. Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings have retained four players each, the maximum permissible number.

The new compositions will now have to quickly settle down to create an impact.

For the first time, many players will be turning out for sides that are not from their cities, adding a new dimension and making it a truly global league. For instance, Delhi-based Gautam Gambhir is leading the Knight Riders, Punjab’s Yuvraj Singh is the Pune Warriors captain and Bangalore’s Rahul Dravid plays for Rajasthan Royals.

One thing is for sure that all franchises have been more astute in putting together their squads, not splurging money on marquee players. That has lent more balance to the teams and therefore the competition can be more intense.

Nothing like the new season throwing up new champions. The last three editions have thrown up different champions—Rajasthan Royals (2008), Deccan Chargers (2009) and Chennai Super Kings (2010) -- making it clear that the Twenty20 is a lottery and it has nothing to do with the big names.