CricDigs Blogs

This piece of news comes in as a big boost for the second edition of the IPL. The English cricket players were conspicuous due to their absence from the inaugural season of the IPL. Only Mascarenhas played the IPL’s inaugural matches and that too after a lot of arguing with the ECB. However, the Indian Premier League’s main architect, Lalit Modi, is more than certain that the new season of the IPL would feature most of England’s top cricketing names. IPL officials are looking forward to this as the Caribbean Stanford Cup is also aiming to attract the English players.

The Rajasthan Royals have emerged as the top contenders for hiring some of the top county and international English cricketers. Already, there has been an initiative to bring in more of the English players into the domestic Indian cricketing scene with Vikram Solanki already having played for the Rajasthan Ranji team. The IPL can no longer be ignored by the ECB with the national players breathing down its neck to let them rake in the moolah like the rest of the international cricketing fraternity.

The major threat to this IPL initiative still stands in the form of the Stanford Championship matches which promises to make each of the English players richer by millions of dollars. The English team participating in the event is to be lead by their new captain, Kevin Pieterson and there is a school of thought which believes that this might pave the way for the Stanford organisers to steal away the English players from the IPL.