The Indian Premier League format of Cricket game was started only last year by the Board of Control for Cricket in India i.e, BCCI. It was having eight teams competing for the cup with millions of dollars of price money for the winning team.
Each team had a maximum of four foreign players, who were from all top cricket playing nations like Australia, England, West Indies, South Africa and Sri Lanka.
The teams were playing against each other in a nail biting 20 overs format. Each team had to play for only twenty overs , and the entire game would get over in three hours time.
Because of the presence of great talents in each team, the match used to be a thriller every minute with lot of fortune changes happening regularly. That resulted in massive viewer ship for the program across the globe.
That brought in massive advertisement revenues for the BCCI which ended up raking over 300 million dollars in the process.
Now, the BCCI has firmed up the IPL2 series which is to be played in South Africa from today. The format remains the same and there will be four foreign players per team, with dominant Indian presence in each team.
BCCI was forced to take out the IPL2 series out of India due to the reluctance of the Government of India in providing the needed security for the players and spectators.
There are people who say that politics played spoil sport for the game this time, and the massive money involved made BCCI courageous enough to take the game out of India on a short notice.
And there was a bitter fight between England Cricket board and South African Cricket board to host the game on short notice, but the priced series was won by South African Cricket board, because it was able to show the much needed speed and efficiency in planning out the entire schedule in few days.