What is ICL or Indian Cricket League?

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 is currently Twenty20. Tau Devi Lal stadium in Panchkula, a place near Chandigarh will be hosting the ICL for season 2007. This stadium has 20,000 seating capacity and ICL is planning to lease this stadium for 10 years.

History

Zee Telefilms (part of Subhash Chandra promoted Essel Group) bid for the telecast rights of the biggest international cricket event - 2003 World Cup. Although the highest bid, it was unsuccessful. 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 content,” 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. 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 November 2007.

Only professional, paid and accountable people have been hired to run the ICL. There will be no "honorary-positions" such as unpaid selectors. 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 Session

The inaugural season for the Indian Cricket League was scheduled to begin in October 2007 but later shifted to 2nd week of November with six club teams.

Six teams of private clubs : -
1) Mumbai Champs - Sandip Patil (coach)
2) Chennai Super Stars - Madan Lal (coach)
3) Chandigarh Lions - Balwinder Sandhu (coach)
4) Hyderabad Heroes - Moin Khan (coach)
5) Kolkata Tigers - Darryl Cullinan (coach)
6) Delhi Jets - Michael Bevan (coach)

### 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

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