The tussle that began inoccently enough with an email by the Cricket Association of Bengal(CAB) Chairman to Lalit Modi raising the issue of the 80:20 ratio for ticket allocation between Red Chillies Entertainment the owner of the Kolkata IPL franchise and CAB has been steadily snowballing. The associates and partners and other affiliates who used to get large portions of the Eden Garden tickets are now fighting for a bigger share saying 20 percent is not enough.
Lalit Modi initially had taken a tough stand saying take or leave it. If you don’t want to host the matches, we are fine with it. We will just go to another city that is willing and ready to host the matches. It looked like the CAB had backed down after the tough stance.
But at the meeting of all the stakeholders - the old warhorse and former chairman of the BCCI and ICC Jagmohan Dalmiya jumped into the fray and became the pointsman for all the opposing factions. Now, Dalmiya is spearheading the move demanding atleast 50 percent of the seats.
Shah Rukh Khan has said a firm NO. We won’t compromise on this. We were promised 80 percent of the seats and we will not budge on that. It is for the BCCI to work out the details with the CAB. We are not directly involved in the issue. So, the ball is firmly back in the court of the BCCI.
Let’s see how things work out.
4 responses so far ↓
1 raj // Mar 11, 2008 at 8:22 am
SRK made a mistake by signing TT as media partner
2 KGD // Mar 11, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Is there any stadium have got seats more than 50K, where IPL matches are scheduled?If 80:20 is followed then Kolkata team will get nearly double share of Tickets than any other Team. Why?
3 Indian Premier League Cricket // Mar 11, 2008 at 1:35 pm
KGD,
I am not aware of any other stadium with such a high capacity. But I think when drawing up the contracts it was a uniform one for all city teams and the capacity of Eden Gardens was not considered at that time.
4 Gautam Biswas // Mar 14, 2008 at 11:38 am
SRK updated himself to solve any problem of IPL. As CAB has rented out their Cricket Ground at Eden Gardens in Kolkata for IPL matches to RC then their is no question to provide Free Tickets to the Members of CAB & SSS (Salt Lake Stadium) as they used to enjoy the previlage during Test Matchs and ODIs organised by BCCI at Eden Gardens,Kolkata.
Now the question is the IPL is also being organised by BCCI but BCCI has already sold 8 Teams to different Sponsorers.
So from now we may say that CRICKET is the New Comodity of Indian Comodity Market.
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