By IANS
New Delhi : Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Thursday threw his weight behind the breakaway Indian Cricket League (ICL) by allowing matches to be held at stadiums owned by the railways across India.
“It’s (ICL) a good initiative,” Lalu Prasad said of the media magnate Subhash Chandra-promoted tournament planned for this October-November.
“ICL will give rise to competition, and good players would be encouraged,” he told reporters at Rail Bhawan here.
After the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) instructed its affiliated units not to lend their grounds for the rebel matches, the Essel Group, under whose banner the ICL will be played, was forced to look elsewhere.
The railways, which has over 30 stadiums across the country, was a good target for Chandra.
“We will definitely allow them to play at our stadiums,” Lalu Prasad said. He also said that some money would be charged for letting the grounds.
Lalu Prasad is the second politician after former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijay Singh, now a Congress general secretary, to openly back Chandra in his endeavour.
Interestingly, BCCI president Sharad Pawar, chief of the Nationalist Congress Party, and Lalu Prasad, president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, are part of the United Progressive Alliance government at the centre.
With Lalu Prasad joining Digvijay to support ICL, Pawar seems to have been isolated. The BCCI has no control over the railways grounds.
So far, the BCCI has been taking a position against ICL and has announced that any organisation that has any player or its affiliated unit assisting the rival league would lose all usual benefits from the board.
Chandra has set aside a Rs.1 billion corpus fund for ICL, designed on the lines of Australian media mogul Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket (WSC) of the late 1970s that shook the cricket world, especially the Australian cricket board.
One similarity between the two ventures is the television rights. Packer launched the WSC after being denied the rights for matches by the Australian board.
Chandra’s Zee group lost to Nimbus last year in the race for four-year television rights for international matches to be held in India.