IPL unleashes a political mud-slinging

The shifting of the Indian Premier League to another country turned into a political mud-slinging match with Home Minister P Chidambaram hitting out at the BCCI and the BJP for blaming the government for relocating the event.

A day after the organisers took the surprise decision to shift the Twenty20 tournament abroad, Chidambaram made a scathing attack on BJP leaders Narendra Modi and Arun Jaitley for politicising the IPL issue.

As the IPL acquired a political hue, IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi and some other officials prepared to leave for South Africa and England to finalise the venue for the cash-rich event.

While England was considered the favourite to host the matches till yesterday, South Africa emerged as the front runner today as Modi and his colleagues will head to the rainbow nation first.

Weather turned out to be the main factor that swayed the BCCI officials against using England as a venue. The officials feared that rain would seriously disrupt the schedule of the tournament to be held from April 10 to May 24.

Modi said that he had been booked both for England and South Africa and it appears now that the venue of the tournament may take a couple of more days before it is finalised.

Modi will be accompanied by ICL CEO Sundar Raman and Tournament Director Dhiraj Malhotra.

The shifting of the venue, meanwhile, has come as a disappointment for the Indian players, now in Auckland.

Sachin Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh, Gautam Gambhir and L Balaji rued missing the chance of playing in front of their home crowd.

"It is disappointing that the IPL has been moved out of India. We will certainly miss playing in front of our supporters. It won't be the same," said Tendulkar, who is the captain of Mumbai Indians team.

"It was a good concept to play home and away matches. This is something that the teams will miss this time around," he said.

Yuvraj, who is also the skipper of Kings XI Punjab, said, "It is sad that the IPL won't be held in India. But we have to go ahead with it as it is the decision of the Board. As we would be returning home from New Zealand after a long tour, we hope we are allowed to take our families along," he added.

In Mumbai, the IPL received a shot in the arm with the Mumbai High Court refusing to give any interim relief to Sony in its row with BCCI with regard to IPL's broadcasting rights.

Sony has challenged termination of its contract by the BCCI, but Justice S J Kathawalla today said that Sony cannot be given any temporary relief, as it had not made World Sports Group (Mauritius) a party.

BCCI, in the early hours of March 15, 2009 entered into a new contract with WSGM, after terminating the contract with Sony earlier evening.

The hearing of the case would resume on March 30, but today's order says that BCCI-WSGM contract is not "null and void", and "creation/transfer of rights in favour of WSGM is absolute and complete"