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The first ICL tournament concluded on the 16th of December 2007. Chennai Superstars were the winners while the Chandigarh Lions led by former New Zealand all-rounder, Chris Cairns, were the runners-up. Although many more ICL tournaments are on the cards
for the year 2008, there were lots of hurdles for the Essel Group that it needed to bypass in the days ahead to pose any actual threat for the BCCI as its rebel.

Subhas Chandra, the Essel Group Head, announced the formation of the ICL on 3rd April 2007. One important reason that was put forth by Chandra in this context was that he was empathetic about the disappointment caused to the Indian cricket fans due to the Indian team’s early exit from the World Cup 2007 held in the Caribbean Islands. Prior to the World Cup, the Indian team was found to perform shabbily on the Protean soil both in the tests as well as in the one-dayers.

Chandra observed, "We feel that despite cricket being a passion, a religion in this country, and despite it having great commercial players, BCCI has only 6 A-grade players signed up. Therefore, there is need for some united effort to create a talent pool. And this will be done by a three-pronged strategy - discovery, diligence and display."¹ He further emphasized, "A professional league is the need of the hour as is a killer instinct in the players."²

It was also felt by many that Chandra’s move was aimed to attract the advertisers and cricket sponsors who incurred heavy losses on the investments they made in anticipation of a good performance by the Indian cricket team in the World Cup.

ICL: The Initiative

It was reported that the Indian Cricket League, a joint venture between the Essel Group and the IL&FS Group was set to be set-up with a corpus of INR 100 crores³. The Essel Group made the bulk of the investment while the IL&FS Group partly funded the venture. It was further decided that in its initial year, the league would have six teams but that would increase to 16 within a span of three years. Each team would include four international players, two Indian cricketers who have represented the county at the international level and eight upcoming cricketers of the country.

It was planned that the league would be an annual event and the first such event would take off in October 2007. The matches would be initially played in the Twenty20 format⁴ and would later be played in the one-day format too. It was also decided that $1 million⁵ would be given away as prize money every year.

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1 "Essel Group announces Indian Cricket League", http://www.zeenews.com/articles.asp?rep=2&aid=363747&sid=SPO&ssid=88, April 3rd, 2007
2 http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/other_international/india/6523317.stm
3 "Essel Group announces Indian Cricket League", http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=363747&sid=SPO&ssid=88
4 Twenty20 format is a one-day game where both teams get to play 20 overs.
5 "Essel Group announces Indian Cricket League", op.cit.

* Contributed by -
Kisholoy Roy,
MBA (Marketing),
Content Editor, Infoedge Management Solutions.