New Delhi, April 3
Zee Telefilms are all set to play a Kerry Packer when it announced here today that it would hold a kind of “parallel” professional Twenty20 Cricket League to challenge the might and monopoly of the monolithic Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

Chairman of the Essel Group Subhash Chandra said at a press conference here today that a Twenty20 format league would be held outside the ambit of the BCCI which would in a way emulate the “Packer Circus” World Series Cricket floated by the Australian media tycoon over three decades ago in 1977, creating a virtual vertical split in the cricket world.

It was to the credit of Packer to revolutionise one-day cricket as it is seen now though Zee cannot have any such pretensions due to lack of infrastructure to hold a cricket league of such importance and national sweep as most of the major cricket venues—Test and ODI—in the country are managed by the State associations with funding from the BCCI.

But Chandra said Rs 100 crore would be put in a corpus fund for the Twenty20 league which will have initially six teams, and each team would be coached by an ex-India player. But he did not specify who those coaches would be as only those players would risk associating with Zee who are prepared to snap all association with the BCCI as almost all the former Test, ODI and Ranji and other national level players are beneficiaries of the board’s pension schemes and sundry other benefits.

Though each team would comprise of four foreign, two Indian and eight budding players, the Zee chairman did not elaborate who those Indian players would be as those who aspire to play for the country or their states would not risk playing for a “parallel tournament” without the sanction of the BCCI.

But the Zee chairman said his group intended setting up cricket academies to draw talent for itself and even the “BCCI was free to draw from the pool of talented players” from those academies.

He claimed that the purpose of floating the “professional league” was to “improve” the quality of cricket talent in the country and may turn out to be the richest professional league with a prize purse of Rs 10 lakh.

He said the idea to hold the league was borne out of the disturbing feeling that “the country with more than a billion cricket fans and a million cricket enthusiasts fair so poorly at the international stage and it was felt that a new approach must be taken for the sports to grow and prosper in the years ahead”.