Board leaves out banned teams
The BCCI has decided not to invite owners of CSK and RR for meeting with its working group
The owners or representatives of the two tainted teams Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals will not be invited when the Indian cricket Board’s newly-formed working group meets the IPL franchises on Thursday and Friday in Mumbai.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) working group of IPL chairman Rajeev Shukla, BCCI secretary Anurag Thakur, treasurer Aniruddh Chaudhary, former India skipper Sourav Ganguly and the Board’s legal advisor Usha Nath Banerjee met for the first time in the Capital on Monday to draw a roadmap for the next edition of the IPL.
“As of now, we are not inviting them. We are not going to take any decision that might send a wrong signal. The BCCI will not take any risk by inviting them. As of now we are trying to tackle the situation that has come up due to the teams in question,” a working group member told HT.
After the Justice Lodha panel’s verdict last month, which banned CSK and RR for two years, BCCI constituted the fourmember working group to study the order. The group has to give its recommendations by August.
“There are some other reasons for the BCCI not wanting any interaction with the banned teams. Look at CSK, it has changed its ownership. Now, some trust will return to the team. But at the moment we don’t know who the owner is and who do we talk to,” he said.
After the meeting, Shukla said, “They (CSK and RR) don’t need to pay anything. Neither do they pay anything to us nor do we have to pay anything to them. We don’t have any views about these two teams right now. Once we finish talking to all the stakeholders, we would then put forward our viewpoint.”
“We have started talking to different stakeholders about how IPL 9 can be made into a great product and how its value can be enhanced. We are thinking about how new things can be added and how we should conduct the next edition of the league particularly after the Justice Lodha panel’s verdict.
“Today, representatives of our sponsors Yes Bank came and met the members of the working group. After this round in Delhi, the working group will move to Mumbai,” said Shukla.
HT has learnt that some key sponsors expressed concern about the image of the IPL in the wake of the Lodha panel verdict. But Shukla claimed all the sponsors were firmly behind the BCCI. “Sponsors are fully behind us,” he said.