For the next 3 months, India will witness two rival twenty20 tournaments. First, the “rebel” unofficial Indian Cricket League and then the “official” Indian Premier League. The IPL has the support for BCCI and all the cricketing boards. And more importantly the ICL, is being opposed by all cricketing boards and steps have been taken by BCCI that ICL does not get genuine cricket stadiums, their players are banned from local, state and national teams. With this as the background, lets look at why ICL is not as second grade as IPL lovers would think it is.

Actually ICL is the original league. Only after ICL was announced by ZEE and Subhash Chandra, BCCI felt threatened that their monopoly over cricket would get affected and arranged the IPL as a counter attack.

IPL is more a business venture where players are bought and sold with an aim to make more money. The cricket teams revolve around big stars who will drop in from all over the world to play for a few days and go back. While ICL ’s official intention is to promote young players. The ICL players are mostly involved only with ICL and the young players are playing the same league all year round. You should watch a game of ICL to see how motivated the young cricketers are.

If you just look at young players, ICL has some great talent too. Ambati Raydu, Abhisehk Jhunjhunwala and Mortaza to name a few. Its just that promoting young players by pushing aside seniors is a new strategy from BCCI. If this started few years back, these would be the Rohit and Ishant Sharma’s of India. Lets look at the biggies. Sachin and Dhoni will play in the IPL. Well ICL has Brian Lara and Inzamam Ul Haq. It is important to note that most of non Indian players may not play in the whole season of IPL because of clashing schedules. ICL has a pretty impressive list of 2020 players, Shane Bond, Lance Klusener, Chris Cairns, Shane Bond. Right, some of them are retired. But they retired from test cricket and one day but were always suited for the 2020 form of the game.

ICL is not a second grade tournament. BCCI would love if you think so. Lets give these fighting cricketers a chance. Lets watch and find out.