By Veturi Srivatsa,
Now two back-to-back tennis leagues will be taking the country by storm on a whirlwind tour and their organisers insist the two are totally different — the International Premier Tennis League (IPTL) has Asia-based franchises while the Champions Tennis League (CTL) is for the six city-based teams in India.
The two leagues should be a lot more popular than all leagues other than cricket. If nothing else, crowds will fill the stands to watch Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray turning out in IPTL and lesser mortals will be turning out in CTL.
The inaugural CTL will be played in six cities — Chandigarh, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi from November 17-26. Tennis has roped in Bollywood star Ajay Devgn if other heroes Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, Abhishek Bachhan, John Abraham got into cricket, kabaddi and football.
The poster boy of IPTL is Federer who is as good as the brand ambassador of the country. After visiting India as UNICEF goodwill ambassador in the aftermath of the Tsunami in 2006 he sold it to a packed Rod Laver Arena, calling India an incredible place and “everyone should visit the country.”
To prove his point he has asked his Indian fans to photoshop him visiting the country because he will be spending only a couple of days in Delhi. The response was fantastic with people from all regions morphing his picture in various ways, from wearing a sherwani at the Taj accompanied by wife Mirka in a lovely saree to a dhothi-clad South Indian and a snake-charmer. He retweeted the pictures of his selection.
The format has fiddled with even scoring to make it some sort of instant tennis with a single-set no-add scoring. And that enables the paying spectator to watch 24 players perform in one evening. A match is fought over five sets in all — men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, mixed doubles and singles match between former champions. The team which wins the most games will take it all.
To make it more entertaining, there will be time outs, power points, shoot-outs, a running shot clock, and there is a Hawk-Eye, too. All this mix will make it more exciting on the telly.
The CTL is more in the fashion of IPL with each franchise hiring overseas players. This time it will have six city based teams playing 13 matches. The six teams are divided into two groups of three each. Each team plays the other in group in a home-and-away format. The team winning the maximum number of games in each group will clash in the final for the prize money of Rs.1 crore. The losing finalists will get Rs. 50 lakhs.
CTL teams will have men and women players between ATP rankings 5 and 25. The six teams will an international legend as their playing captain, apart from a noted Indian male plus a top ranked junior Indian girl and boy. This format has a more exciting look and the spectators can identify with their franchises.
If the IPTL is the brainchild of Mahesh Bhupathi, the CTL has Vijay Amritraj as its driving force and both are marketing men.
India is fast getting known as the capital of sports leagues and yet only cricket’s Indian Premier League (IPL) and its global avatar the Champions League have survived and gaining more muscle. All other leagues are struggling to stay in the reckoning for want of sponsors who could underwrite the losses in the first year or two.
It all started with hockey league with all its contraptions but once the Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) and the sponsors got into trouble it went out after four editions. Then the short-lived World Series Hockey which never looked like sustaining beyond the first edition as by now Hockey India floated its own major League and it is planning to take it to 10 teams in the next couple of years.
After hockey, cricket, badminton, football, wrestling, golf and volleyball got into the league mode. Badminton and volleyball found few takers after one and two seasons respectively while wrestling is still to kick off and the Indian Racing League was announced in 2011 but the concept remained only on paper with Formula 1 overshadowing the motorsports scene.
The spectator response to F1 tapered off after the novelty attracted close to one lakh fans in the first year. There was a steep fall in the crowd response in the second year with only 65,000 turning up. After that some imaginary and real problems cropped up between the organisers, the event went out of the window.
Football made some experiments with its league format, starting with national league from 1996 and after 11 years, its nomenclature changed to I-League and to supplement it the Indian Super League (ISL) is now on. The sport can take heart from the fact that crowds are cramming the stadiums for the ISL, though the fare is not all that hot.
Cricket need not worry about the turnstiles and as long the craze for the game is there the sport will grow from strength to strength whereas all other leagues must create spectator interest. So much so the twenty20 format is threatening the other two variants of the sport – Tests and One-Day Internationals (ODI). Result-oriented Tests have created enough excitement while the ODIs are hanging in.
Badminton had an attractive international line-up of stars and had a reasonable success, though the coffers have little to show to make it viable. After the 2013 inaugural edition, this year’s edition was dropped so that the Badminton World Federation (BWF) could tweak its calendar to provide a three-month window for leagues all over the world get slots before the new season gets underway in March.
(Veturi Srivatsa is a senior journalist. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at [email protected])