Awaiting The Indian Premier League

Indian Premier League or IPL as it is famously known, is gunning for its second season.

It is the brainchild of BCCI commissioner Mr. Lalit Modi and is modelled on the likes of the European club football. It as initially launched to give a stiff fight to the ICL series started by Mr. Kapil Dev.

In its first season, it collected a gross of around 1.75 million US$ and the BCCI said that it had a made a profit of $5.1 million after paying the players.

There are eight teams and each team is owned by people who are ready to splurge as much is necessary to give their team the cutting edge, best coaches, best trainer; nothing but just the best!

Barring the Rajasthan Royals every other team had a professional coach. Rajasthan's captain Shane Warne acted as both.

The players are literally treated, as vegetables in a market: haggling, outbidding, and what not!

The costliest player to be purchased was MS. Dhoni, for the Chennai Superkings for $1.5 million and is the captain of the squad.

The IPL is not restricted to Indian players and foreign players are also welcome. In fact, this had resulted in many owners going in for more overseas players ignoring the local talent, in spite being a restriction on the no of foreign players in a team (at present only five international players are allowed in a team for any match).

The IPL might be attracting the moolah and the crowd, but it does also, reduce the charm of watching an actual match between two countries. Since every team has foreign players it is very weird to see the players gelling around when they might actually be thirsting for one another's blood, when their individual countries battle it out!

But theIPL also helped genuine talent to come to the fore, not just Indian but also foreign: Swapnil Asnodkar, Manpreet Goni, Shane Watson to name a few.

As controversies are part of any event, the IPL too had its share:Mumbai Indians acting captain Harbhajan Singh slapping S. Sreesanth: Kings XI Punjab bowler and fellow Indian teammate.While Sreesanth could be seen openly sobbing on fellow kings xi teammate, Kumar Sangakkara; Indian cricket team's shame literally was dragged to the streets.

The highlights of the IPL were its spell binding opening ceremony (although it was nothing compared to the olympic opening ceremony); the King Khan's gesture of giving a gold helmet studded with diamonds to the man of the match and the underdog team of Rajasthan Royals winning the maiden IPL T20 competition.

As the new season of the IPL arrives, I can just hope that it satisfies the crowd waiting to watch it:Korbo Lorbo jeetbo re, korbo lorbo re, jeetbo re!