Former Australia pacer Glenn McGrath may not have played competitive cricket since last year’s Indian Premier League but feels that would not be an issue when he puts on his boots for the tournament’s second season which kicks off in South Africa on April 18.

McGrath, who plays for the Delhi Daredevils, has been largely busy bringing up his three children following wife Jane’s death. He also has to take care of the charity organisation founded by his wife but will put everything to the back burner for five gruelling weeks of IPL action. However, despite his 39 years, McGrath, who emerged the most economical (6.61) of Delhi Daredevils bowlers, claims his competitive edge is still intact.

“I struggled a bit last year, but that was more about Jane and how the situation is back home,” McGrath said. “That won’t be a concern this time. Mum may bring the kids over for the middle period, depending on the schedule. My whole focus will be a lot different when I’m there, which I think will all be positive. Last time I think I did reasonably well considering I hadn’t played for 12 months. I have no doubts it will be similar this time, but my mindset will be different,” he told ‘Cricinfo’.

The Australian legend admitted he could not say no to the IPL with the amount of money on offer.

“There is a lot of incentive going over there with the money they’re offering. Cricket is not something that I have a great desire to get back and play at the moment. I’m very happy being retired and with everything that I achieved in my life. In saying that, as soon as I got on the field in India (in 2008), I couldn’t help being competitive. My natural instincts came out and I was away. That won’t be an issue,” said McGrath.

“Last year I did a heap of fitness work leading into it, and when I bowled in the nets for half a session I felt like I hadn’t ever been away from the game. When I played that Twenty20 match earlier on in the year for NSW, and I hadn’t done any work leading into it, it felt like I had never bowled before in my life.

“So basically if I’m fit my bowling will come back really quickly, and if I’m not fit I’m useless,” said McGrath, who will be in Delhi his week for the Daredevils’ week-long training camp before leaving for South Africa on April 7.
Source – cricket.ndtv.com

During last year’s IPL season, the Chinnaswamy Stadium, home of Vijay Mallya’s Royal Challengers Bangalore, was graced by the presence of the F1 car of Mallya’s Force India outfit. Like the car, Bangalore’s batsmen lagged well behind the competition, travelling at a sedate pace.

From the moment that Wasim Jaffer and captain Rahul Dravid walked out to the middle for the first match of the season against Kolkata Knight Riders in front of the packed home crowd and the Force India machine, Bangalore were destined to be left behind. Reinforced by Jacques Kallis and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the Karnataka-based outfit’s batsmen were never going to fire up in the high-octane format.

Their run rate was by far the worst in the competition, and but for a three-run win over the Deccan Chargers, Bangalore would have finished last.

Aside from the magnitude of the results, Bangalore’s archaic approach to the task at hand was truly staggering. In addition to the plethora of batsmen who played in a manner reminiscent of Test players of a bygone era, the squad was filled with aging outfielders incapable of threatening the opposition batsmen. With the likes of Anil Kumble, Dravid and Kallis patrolling the circle, Bangalore were never going to worry their foes inside the ring; apart from Virat Kohli and Cameron White, all of their fielders were below average for the needs of T20.

Leading the dinosaur procession were none other than the two giants, the two symbols of Karnataka cricket: Dravid and Kumble. The pair played as though they had lived their entire careers in the 1960s and were transported forward by a time machine, and never looked like adapting to the fluidity of the modern game. Meanwhile, the team management seemed in a trance, unwilling to make any bold moves to rectify the situation.

In between IPL seasons, Force India outfit went through an even worse time, as the F1 season carried on through 2008. In the most ruthless, political and money-driven of sports, where every regulation is bent at every possible opportunity, Mallya’s drivers failed to score a single point. Force India were regularly two seconds a lap slower, sometimes more, than the front runners, and scraped into the top ten only once.

If any sport is going to engender the ruthlessness that is needed at the top level, it would be F1, which moves like no other. Such is the pace of development that even the most ineffective of the minnows will be faster than Ferrari and McLaren were just 18-24 months earlier.

Judging by the progress of his teams in the past month, Mallya appears to have been hardened by his first year in international sport. Last week, Force India surpassed their best result in the first race of the new season, and were only 1.5 seconds slower than the frontrunners in qualifying. Early in the race, they were able to withstand the pressure from faster cars that were seeking to overtake them.

On the home front, Mallya certainly appears to have become more hard-nosed. The dour and unenterprising Dravid has been removed as captain and replaced by Kevin Pietersen. Although Dravid’s absence for the entire has been passed off as a family matter (his wife being pregnant), few would be gullible enough to believe that Dravid would voluntarily miss an entire season of such a lucrative tournament, especially as his overseas travel has been greatly reduced in the last two years by his omission from the ODI squad.

Mallya’s move is necessary if Bangalore want to keep pace with the front-runners. For too long, Indian cricket administrators have been reluctant to do away with senior players who no longer merit the positions they earned in their halcyon days. Sourav Ganguly famously went on and on until the bitter confrontation with Greg Chappell, while Kumble became increasingly irrelevant in his final year of Test cricket. Little wonder that there was a marked improvement in the team performance when MS Dhoni filled in and then took over from Kumble, and when Ganguly was omitted from the team until he regained it through merit. It seems that with the multiple-captains policy, Kolkata may be setting out a similar path in an attempt to ease out Ganguly.

With ever-increasing financial stakes riding on the success of the franchises, merit will loom ever larger when Indian administrators select their personnel. And not before time either. At least that will be one major improvement amid the increasingly ostentatious cricketing landscape of our time
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Player/coach Shane Warne and his Indian Premier League (IPL) defending champions the Rajasthan Royals with South Africans Graeme Smith and Morné Morkel in tow will open the Tshwane chapter of this swashbuckling T20 cricket extravaganza when they take on the Delhi Daredevils at SuperSport Park on Tuesday April 28.

The tournament – which was moved to South Africa last week amid security concerns in India – will squeeze 59 games into just 34 days, starting in Cape Town on Saturday April 18 and finishing with the final on Sunday May 24.

The Bangalore Royal Chargers will feature the most South Africans of any IPL team, including the newest Proteas hero Roelof van der Merwe.Dale Steyn, Dillon du Preez, Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher are the other South Africans contracted to the Royal Chargers.
Van der Merwe, who scored a quick-fire 48 off 30 balls, followed by a run out of Callum Ferguson and then claimed the key wicket of David Hussey in a superb all-round performance for the South Africans in helping them beat Australia at SuperSport Park on Sunday, confirmed that he had signed for the franchise in February.

Van der Merwe was also celebrating his inclusion in the South African one-day international squad yesterday.

South Africa’s Herschelle Gibbs has also made it on to the team list of the Deccan Chargers.

Gibbs, who was associated with the Hansie Cronje match-fixing saga, has not returned to India since serving a ban for his involvement.

Indian police have made no secret about the fact that they wished to question him over the issue.With the tournament now in South Africa though, Gibbs has been snapped-up as a game-breaker.

Although eight grounds will be in use the IPL had decided not to allocate “home” venues to any of the franchises.

Durban, Pretoria and Johannesburg are the cities with the largest Indian population and it was decided to play 33 of the 56 regular season games in these grounds.

Each franchise is scheduled to play a total of seven to nine games in these three grounds.
Source – iol.co.za

Let’s see, what the relocation of IPL brought for the franchises—reduced concern for security, and increased costs on the logistics, renewed headache of reworking the budget and new sets of hassles of wooing the sponsors once again with the lure of revised incentives. The brands that invested millions as a price of wide ranging visibility during the one and half month league, are all set to either cut back on their budget or dropping out altogether from the deal as IPL prepares to travel to another continent, where most of the sponsors have very little or no brand values.For all the sponsors belonging to the industries as varied as soft drink to heavy electricals – shift in the IPL venue means one thing in common and that is the missed opportunities on connecting to the targeted audience. The net result: Huge numbers of the Indian Premier League sponsors are going on an evaluation spree and the majority of them are likely to drop the franchises for good. A number of them are also in the mood of tweaking the terms. The sad specter of global recession had already hit them hard and now the export of IPL came as the final nail on the coffin and you can not blame the companies such as Religare, Bajaj Allianz and HDIL that decided to back out from the contract.While Bajaj Allianz has terminated its sponsorship deal with the defending Champions Rajasthan Royals, HDIL pulled out from the title sponsorship of Kolkata Knight Riders and Religare ceases to continue with their association with Delhi Daredevils. There are other big names such as cola major Coca-Cola and mobile service provider Virgin Mobile, who have stopped short of signing any new deal with the IPL in its second phase.

Coca-Cola, and Deccan Chargers were having talks for signing a sponsorship deal, but the Cola major was reported to drop the plan. In another move, Virgin Mobile has decided to pull back on a proposed licensing deal with Delhi Daredevils as official mobile partner. As goes the industry news, majority of the existing sponsors are now demanding a reworking on the contract. While some demands compensation, others seek extra advantages for the same price. The corporate houses that made multi-year deal with Indian Premier League, finds the time most opportune for coaxing out better deals for the season three in advance.

However, things are not that bleak for the Mumbai Indians. “Several new marquee brands are supporting Mumbai Indians this season, even under a changed economic environment. It is a huge vote of confidence in the potential of our team,” Mumbai Indians team owner Nita M Ambani said. The Mumbai franchise has just sealed deals with Pernod Richard as official partner for spirits and wines.

The other companies that are sponsoring the Reliance owned team are Wrigley, PepsiCo, MasterCard, Kingfisher and Adidas. The team hopes to sign further sponsorship deals with some of the insurance, pharmaceuticals, electronics and travel majors. And there are sponsors too who have decided to stick to their deals despite recession and change in venue. Puma and Hero Honda are major among these rare creeds. “We will shift on ground promotional activities to South Africa, though our in-store promotions will continue in India,” said Puma India’s CEO Rajiv Mehta. Meanwhile television advertisers are busy reworking their on-air deals with Indian Premier League as they fear the changed match schedule for the upcoming cricket tournament is going to affect the viewer ship.
Source – cricket360.com

Western Province Cricket announced on Tuesday that Indian Premier League tickets would go on sale from Friday at Newlands as well as at Computicket.

Newlands Stadium manager Cyril Martin confirmed that there has been “major interest” from the public and that ticket prices had been kept in line with those for the ICC Twenty20 World Championships in 2007. “We’ve done everything in our power to keep prices affordable.”

Ticket prices for the opening day, Saturday, April 18, which will comprise a double-header – Bollywood entertainment during the mid-afternoon break and an opening ceremony after the two matches – will range from R50 for children, R100 for a grass ticket, to R200 for a seat. During the opening ceremony, Hollywood actors Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman are likely to make an appearance alongside Bollywood superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta.

Last year’s finalists, the Chennai Super Kings, will open the tournament against the Mumbai Indians – local hero JP Duminy and Indian superstar Sachin Tendulkar’s team.

The second match will be between the inaugural IPL champions the Rajasthan Royals and the Bangalore Royal Challengers. The Royals will feature Australian legend Shane Warne and Proteas skipper Graeme Smith while the Challengers have a large SA contingent headed by Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher.
Source – iol.co.za