Kerry Packer’s World Series back in the 70’s ushered the first innovations in the game. Day and night games, TV Replays, The White Ball and Coloured Clothes everything was Packer’s contribution to the game he didn’t know much about.
I was a watching a Pranoy Roy show just before the World Cup started involving Imran Khan and Tony Greig, when they recollected how Packer first thought about Flood Lights. As a result the White Ball was invented and so were the Coloured clothes.
The prize money is quite huge and also the initial fund earmarked from Subhash Chandra's side is around 100 Crores. This is another attempt by him to take a bite in the Indian Cricket market after launching Zee Sports in an attempt to get the BCCI contract for broadcasting Indian Cricket which he lost out on.
Kerry Packer too went ahead with alternative to Test Cricket after loosing out on the Cricket TV broadcast rights in 1976 from Australian Cricket Board.
It will be interesting to see the future developments, the main roadblocks being,
- BCCI? If they don't provide the infrastructure and stop the players.
- If the players themselves don't join in. The last time Packer did this times were different. Cricket was not such a money spinner as it is today and player wages were quite low as compared to that offered by Packer. It will interesting to see if Subhash Chandra hikes player fees to bring more stars to his matches.
- The main roadblock is,
Jab Ek Cricket hi nahi sambhal raha to alternate Cricket kya khak sambhlega
Technorati Tags: Cricket, Zee TV, Subash Chandra, Kerry Packer
5 comments:
i support this attempt!
money is always the centric force in all the fields, and here money to performance graph will be a good one to watch for!
Cheers Zee
depends now thr is so much money ppl wont come playin for it liek they did earlier
Hey, I'm all for it if it makes the game fun. I don't care whether it makes players better, whatever. I just want to be able to go to gachibowli, or sit at home in from of the tv and really *enjoy* a game of cricket. The last I did that was when tendulkar was hitting kasprowicz out of the city in sharjah, and IMHO I've just been bored after that. Looking forward to this.
hey sunil
ages since tht happened :)
u have beeen bored for real long time it seems
chk out th memoirs posted on this blog
they will keep u entertained :)
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