Hardly any Indian flavour in IPL

Well the multimillion dollar IPL was launched keeping in mind to bring up some new talent by giving yougsters a chance to showcase their skills. Keeping in mind that it has to be the Indian players who will have to benefit to a greater extent from the IPL, Lalit Modi put a restriction on the number of foreign players that can be included in the playing 11 to at the most four. However, there is no restriction on the number of players from India that can be included in the playing eleven. But, despite there being three editions of IPL being passed by, hardly any Indian flavour has been seen.

In the previous two editions of the IPL, the winners of the trophy happened to be the Rajasthan Royals in 2008 and the Deccan Chargers in 2009, both the teams which were captained by Australians. Luckily, the runners up happened to be the Chennai Superkings and the Royal Challengers Bangalore which were captained by Indians namely Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Anil Kumble respectively in 2008 and 2009. As mentioned earlier, there can be less than 4 overseas players featuring in the playing XI but the same is maintained at 4 exactly in most of the games. This means that all captains consider the foreign players as trump cards.

It is not an unknown fact that foreign players are included taking into account their credibility and caliber unlike Indian players who are included owing to the rules imposed by the IPL organizing committee. The man of the series awards in 2008 and 2009 was awarded to Shane Watson and Adam Gilchrist respectively, both of whom are from Australia. Out of the 8 teams in the IPL, this year luckily 5 teams have Indian captains unlike in the second edition where 4 teams had foreign players as captains viz KKR (Brendon McCullum), RCB (Kevin Pietersen), Deccan Chargers (Adam Gilchrist) and Rajasthan Royals (Shane Warne).

The RCB and KKR were found having faith in players like Kevin Pietersen and Brendon McCullum who had hardly captained their national sides. There was no reason to consider McCullum over Ganguly who had a better run as captain for India. So was the case with Anil Kumble who was forced into captaincy only after Kevin Pietersen had to return back owing to injury. Had there been no injuries to Pietersen, one could not think of Anil Kumble captaining the RCB side. And, had it not been for Kumble, RCB would have not even reached the semis. And, regarding the coaches of the teams, nothing need to be cited specially.