By IANS,
Bangalore : The inaugural of the Indian Premier League (IPL) Twenty20 tournament got off with a 45-minute glitz and glamour show before the clash between Bangalore Royal Challengers and Kolkata Knight Riders as a near-full M. Chinnaswamy Stadium roared ‘Welcome to Bengaluru’.
Charu Sharma, chief executive officer of liquor baron Vijay Mallya-owned Royal Challengers team, set the tone for the music and dance show with a ‘Welcome to Bengaluru’ greetings.
Soon after, the trio of Shankar-Ehsan-Loy had the almost full 55,000-capacity stadium foot tapping with fast-moving mix of Hindi film and pop music.
Shankar Mahadevan regaled the audience with popular Hindi film song “Jhoom barabar…” and it was followed by lots of fancy fireworks.
The stadium began to fill nearly six hours before the show began at 6.30 p.m. Hundreds of people had begun queueing up around noon to get the vantage seats.
Ten Washington Redskins cheerleaders in blue shorts and tops trooped in to the -cheers from the capacity audience.
Women on four-foot stilts, eight in all white and four each in the teams’ colours, dancers in air bubbles and eight acrobats held the crowd enthralled with their skills.
The sporting crowd kept their spirits up with continuous cheer and deafening roar.
A breathtaking laser show with golden yellow, green, blue beams in various formations and a burst of fireworks topped the show as four acrobats glided down to the pitch from top of the stadium carrying the banners of the eight teams that will clash in the inaugural twenty20 league.
The first match of the 45-day, 59-tie tournament, between the Bangalore Royal Challengers and Kolkata Knight Riders, followed the opening ceremony.