Stop looking at everything through IPL tinted glasses

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Avnish Anand

01 June, 2010

It is time the sports fraternity realised that the world of professional sports leagues does not begin and end with the IPL.

THE WORLD Series of Boxing; a global quasi-professional boxing league with 12 franchisees is starting shortly. One of the franchisees is Delhi and the team has been sponsored by Videocon. It’s a wonderful initiative and will do a world of good for Indian boxing. The Asian franchisees had a meeting recently and the COO of the league Ivan Khodabaksh was asked this question by the ESPN Star reporter.

“Recently there was a scandal in the IPL, where the source of the funds used to bid for franchisees was not clearly known. What is the WSB doing to ensure it doesn’t have a similar issue?”

This reporter obviously thought that the IPL was the centre of the professional sports leagues’ universe and everyone aspiring to set up a new league had to copy the Indian league and learn from its mistakes. He clearly had no clue that there are bigger and more well established leagues in the world which have sorted out such issues a long time back. So one doesn’t need to look at the IPL for everything. He also showed his ignorance of the real issues facing the WSB by not asking the relevant questions.

That the AIBA has actually shown great vision in coming up with this concept and is not as despotic, incompetent and corrupt as the BCCI was something that hadn’t crossed the reporter’s mind. Else he would have realized that most of the IPL controversy is of the BCCI’s own making.

I hope such people are not entrusted the task of covering the WSB events in India.

They will be forever on the lookout for the MRF blimp.