New IPL format, rules, confuse team-owners
The Indian Premier League franchises are up in arms over the league’s new format and clauses related to player contracts and retention. According to the popular cricket website, Cricinfo, there were some franchises who were not happy with the unnecessary complications that the new format brought.
Writing on the social networking website, Twitter, Shah rukh http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Knight-c71599 Riders said that the new rules were confusing and that all the players should have gone into the auction pool to simplify the process. According to the rules announced by the IPL governing council, the teams could retain up to a maximum of four players from the previous seasons but would need to pay a huge price for it.
The first player that the teams retained will be priced at $1.8, followed by $1.3 million, $900,000 and $500,000 for the subsequent three. The maximum salary cap is $9 million which means that if the four players are retained, then the team will be left with only $4.5 million to buy the remaining 25-odd.
Another team official was reportedly unhappy with the rule because it is said to support only a team which has players worth that much. Sachin Tendulkar and http://www.senore.com/Cricket/MS-Dhoni-c2028 are two of the players who fit that bill, but for the rest, it is not worth that much money. This could mean that most of the players will be released by the teams for the auction.
There were a few owners who grumbled about the reduced number of games for every team – from the earlier planned 18 in the league stage to 14. Lalit Modi, the erstwhile chairman of the IPL, had announced in 2009 that there will be 94 games in the tournament, but player exhaustion and fitness issues propelled the board to reduce the tournament to 74 games. One unnamed team owner said, "The business revenue models were calculated on the extra games and I think that the new clauses had, for the franchises, made the IPL "a loss-making proposition".
The complex format could also mean that the fans will have their own difficulties understanding where their teams stand and which team do they play against. For example, based on the draws, it could well happen that http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Mumbai-c820 Indians may play Kolkata Knight Riders – two of the most attractive teams in the competition – only once, whereas two others may play each other four times including the knock-outs.
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