The ongoing IPL controversy may just have claimed an unlikely casualty?cricket grounds. At least two prominent cricket venues?Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai and Sawai Man Singh Stadium in Jaipur?will not host IPL matches any more from next year. ?The respective managements of these cricket venues have decided to endorse the decision in their executive committee meetings likely to take place very soon,? sources told FE.
The Brabourne stadium in south Mumbai is controlled by the wealthy Parsi lobby which does not want to take up responsibility of hosting IPL matches due to internal tussle with a section of Board of Control for Cricket in India in-charge of IPL grounds, sources in Mumbai cricket associations said.
?World Cup cricket is our focus for 2011. The returns from hosting the IPL matches does not match the efforts that go into preparing the ground facilities to host back-to-back IPL matches,? a senior executive of Cricket Club of India said requesting anonymity. In IPL-3, the Brabourne stadium hosted seven matches while Jaipur too hosted a couple of matches.
For Jaipur, the decision to boycott IPL matches from the Swai Man Singh stadium is to do with the cricket politics involved between the loyalist of Lalit Modi, the beleaguered IPL commissioner and the Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA), sources said.
The main reason for boycotting IPL matches is commercial viability, experts said. The bulk of the earnings from IPL matches goes back to IPL and franchises and whatever little money comes to the venues is routed through the various state-level cricket associations and that too after three to six months of hosting the matches. The only direct sources of making money for the venues is from the sale of special tickets in the VVIP stands, mostly involving cash dealings. With the state governments of Punjab, Rajasthan and West Bengal probing all such dealings in IPL-3, the stadium management of several states are wary of dealing with IPL for the time, sources said.
Even for IPL-3, a section of RCA made life tough for Rajasthan Royals. ?If Modi is out of IPL-4, RCA may re-work its strategy of retaining the Jaipur stadium for IPL-4. But for now, it is not interested in hosting Rajasthan Royals in IPL-4,? a senior ex-cricketer in the know of RCA?s internal politics said.
But what may be the loss of Mumbai and Jaipur, will be gain for various state cricket associations that are lining up to offer their respective home grounds for IPL-4. Prominent among those are the existing cricket venues in Ranchi, Guwahati, Faridabad, Indore, and Goa. The IPL governing council is also planning to award contracts for the construction of new cricket venues, sources said. However, with the current crisis of financial irregularities and allegations of round tripping of money from various tax havens, it will be some time before new cricket venues for T20 matches come up, sources in cricket associations said.