by V. Kumar

Created on: October 12, 2009   Last Updated: October 13, 2009

The Indian Premier league or the IPL, as it has come to be known around the globe among the Cricket fans, owes its success to cricket crazy people of South Asia, especially India , as much as it owes it to the new 20-20 format of cricket.

The IPL is a cricket championship among 8 club teams of India, which have numerous players from all over the world playing for them in tandem with the local Indian players. For most spectators and cricket fans, it offers a unique opportunity to watch cricketing legends from different countries play together as a team. So the opening pair of Sachin Tendulkar of India and Sanath Jayasuriya of Sri Lanka make it a dream pair for all their fans. Even when these legends have not been able to show the same heroics as they have been known for, such combinations and teams evoke strong curiosity and interest among fans.

The first edition of IPL was played in India, and the novelty of the idea created a great interest in public. The way these clubs were auctioned, the way the players from all over the globe were priced as well as the way in which teams bid for players and won them was a unique experience and first of its kind for the cricket lovers in India, and these new innovations evoked enough interest to keep the IPL in the headlines long before the first match was played.

Media hype and publicity campaigns played a vital part in making IPL popular, as did the presence of movie stars like Shahrukh Khan and Preity Zinta and subsequently Shilpa Shetty who were owners of certain teams. All these factors created enough interest and hype for the management to sell Television broadcasting rights at profitable prices. Once the league began, it proved to be worthy of the interest it generated. To a large interested audience, it was also due to the presence of major cricket stars from all over the world. Special mention needs to be made of players like Shane Warne, Adam Gilchrist, Mathew Hayden from Australia who had retired from international cricket but joined the league. Similarly the presence of Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble who do not play twenty twenty matches otherwise was an added attraction.

It would not be wrong to say that the league created its own stars. Players like Ross Taylor and Dilshan dominated the second edition, in addition to the legends. A young and practically unknown cricketer Manish Pandey became the first Indian to score a century in a twenty twenty match. The fact that the league was held in South Africa in 2009 and remained a hit is a tribute to the support cricket gets from its fans around the world.

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