New Delhi - The Indian Premier League's Twenty20 tournament which has a potential to transform world cricket is scheduled to begin later on Friday with the game's biggest names like Sachin Tendulkar and Brett Lee participating in the six-week competition. The IPL, organized by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), is being pitched as the "next big thing" in world cricket and is seen as a heady mix of cricket and cinema with Bollywood superstars owning or promoting teams.
With a reduced format of the game designed to attract a younger fan base and the infusion of glamour of Bollywood stars as well as live entertainment from cheerleaders, the organizers hope to raise the profile of cricket and make it more popular.
The matches between eight teams from different Indian cities will be closely watched by millions in the Indian sub-continent, middle- east as well as other parts of the cricketing world including Britain.
Friday's curtain-raiser at Bangalore's M Chinnaswamy Stadium will launch cricket's richest-ever tournament. The fixture is between Bangalore Royal Challengers led by Rahul Dravid and Kolkata Knight Riders captained by Sourav Ganguly.
The final scheduled to be held in Mumbai on June 1 will have a prize money of 3 million dollars while the eight franchises were bought for a combined 700 million dollars. Television rights were sold for nearly 1 billion dollars.
Nearly 80 top-class cricketers have been contracted for lucrative fees such as Indian batsman Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who earns 1.5 million dollars and South African Jacques Kallis, who is on 900,000 dollars.
The glamour quotient will be complete with film-stars luring cricket and Bollywood-crazy Indians to the stadiums and television screens.
"IPL matches are going to be full of entertainment...larger than life. I believe it's my duty to entertain people whether it's in films or in the IPL matches," Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, the owner of Kolkata Knight Riders told the IANS news agency.
According to Shah Rukh, stars like Rani Mukerji, Bipasha Basu, Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan are expected to attend the first match Friday.
Twenty20 is a shorter format of the one-day form of cricket which was originally introduced in Britain for professional county competition in 2003. Both teams have a single innings and bat for a maximum of 20 overs.
A Twenty20 game is completed in about three hours with each innings lasting about 75 minutes, making the game more exciting and closer to the time-span of other popular team sports like football.
Traditionalists contend that Twenty20 will not produce real cricketers and would mark the end of test cricket.
But Dravid was not sceptical. "It's exciting, something new. Having the opportunity to be part of something like this since inception...I am not dismissive about it," he said.
"I have embraced it...It will bring along new people to the stadia and venues," he told reporters.
