Mumbai: The IPL Governing Council meeting on October 24 would see issues like player regulations and the idea of the women’s version of the popular T20 tournament being discussed in New Delhi.
The things to be discussed in the meeting are, “IPL media rights ITT outcome, CSK legal opinion, Kochi settlement, player regulations 2018 onwards, Rajasthan Royals & Kings XI Punjab venues for the 2018 IPL, franchise owners’ meeting, release fee to overseas boards for players availability , player injury compensation, and women’s event.”
The idea of the Women’s IPL has been doing the rounds since the impressive show by the Indian women in the World Cup earlier this year and former India skipper and current member of the Committee of Administrators (CoA) Diana Edulji has been highly supportive of such a concept despite many BCCI officials rejecting the idea.
If this issue is to be discussed, it means that the BCCI hasn’t yet counted out this idea.
“It would be tough to find many big hitters in women’s cricket. There’s no point in launching it and failing in the process,” said a BCCI official.
On the issue of player retention for the upcoming edition of the IPL, the BCCI officials are in the process of gathering opinions of the different franchises as to whether they should be able to retain their players or put all of them in the auctions.
If a franchise wants to retain a player, then there’s a, ‘Right-to-match’ card against the highest bid for that player in the auctions for the 2018 edition of the tournament.
However, things would become interesting as the two teams- Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and Rajasthan Royals (RR) are set to make a comeback. A meeting is also likely to take place with all the franchises to discuss these issues.
Star Sports, last month bagged the IPL media rights for a whopping amount of ₹16,347.5 crore or $2.55 billion for the next five years. This means that all the teams would get more money from the league. The franchises do not have to pay any franchise fee whatsoever but the meeting of the Governing Council might decide as to how to divide the money equally between the BCCI and the teams.
The IPL GC would also rely on legal opinion to decide whether to approve the transfer of ownership of CSK from India Cements to Chennai Super Kings Cricket Ltd.
The Supreme Court jurisdiction rules out Srinivasan’s return to the BCCI until he gives up ownership of CSK due to issues of conflict of interest.
Rajasthan Royals on the other hand wants to change the name of their name to give the team a new beginning after the negative image it had acquired during the IPL spot-fixing scandals during 2013.
RR along with Kings XI Punjab have expressed desires of shifting their home venue from Jaipur and Mohali respectively.