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Indian badminton seems to have fallen in love with the IPL-league format. After Maharashtra and Karnataka, it’s now the turn of Tamil Nadu to conceive a league – and in a way no one has done it before. The Tamil Nadu league will have international players – the first-such experiment in India – and organizers are even negotiating with a shopping mall to conduct the finals there. Apparently, such is the interest among potential team owners that the league has found more buyers than organizers had anticipated.
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The league is the brainchild of Indian international Aditya Elango. “I got the idea three years ago after the first IPL,” he told Sportskeeda. “At the time, nobody listened to me, but the Maharashtra and Karnataka leagues last year convinced them we could do something like that here too.”
Aditya’s company Game Point – which seeks to promote badminton in Tamil Nadu – is in charge of organizing the league, with the blessings of the TN state association. “The idea has been on paper since October, but we got the TNBA’s confirmation on 1st February,” says Aditya.
Organisers are overwhelmed by the interest from unlikely places like Erode and Coimbatore, and more crucially from the companies they approached. “Earlier, I’d drafted the proposal appealing to the sponsors to support badminton, but the response wasn’t good,” he says. “Then we re-drafted the proposal, showing how the teams would make profits after just the second year. We’d decided on six teams, but there is a demand for us to accommodate eight. We have to take a decision on this.”
Although the final list of players isn’t ready, some of the top Indian players – such as Chetan Anand, Sai Praneeth, HS Prannoy and Sourabh Verma – have expressed their interest. The international players include names such as Malaysian internationals Yogendran Krishnan and Yeoh Kay Bin, and the top-ranked players of Mexico, South Africa and Jamaica. The players are not quite top-draw, but Aditya says he wanted to ensure that there wasn’t too much of a gulf in the standards between the local and international players. “We didn’t want the TN girls to be totally outplayed by the international girls,” he says. “After all, the emphasis is on entertainment.”
Team owners will have to shell out between Rs 5 and Rs 7.5 lakh. They will compete for the winners’ purse of Rs 6 lakh out of the total prize money of Rs 12.5 lakh. The winners of each tie too will get Rs 10,000.
The ‘badminton extravaganza’, as it is being billed, will be held from 1st June to 10th June. The event will be preceded by an open camp at which any child can enroll and get to see the top players up close.
With the league being taken to unlikely places such as Tirupur, Coimbatore, Erode and Madurai, it will be interesting to see if Indian badminton takes a new turn. With an Indian Badminton League expected to take shape soon, badminton sure seems to be in the spotlight.
Show your support for the league at:
http://www.facebook.com/chennaibadminton
