Vineet Sharma

An avid footballer will tell you that there is a passion in club football that cannot be matched even by the intensity of the national matches owing to the local flavour of the former. The year 2008 was the heralding of a new era in the realm of cricket as well. This was the year that T20 league sprung into action and gripped the cricket lovers the world over.

The T20 revolution has brought a new breed of spectators top the stadiums and the adrenaline rush of these 21st century cricket aficionados would certainly not be satiated by the odd T20 fixtures in a series. What the world got this year was the bigger, better package of T20 leagues emerging or growing across the globe. The mavericks of the trade who started the trend Indian Cricket League (ICL) came up with a spectacular second season that gripped the masses, something that many critics were not even contemplating to think. The leagues in the Caribbean, Pakistan, Australia, England and even the million dollar extravaganza, the Stanford 20-20 came to the fore.

The shortest format of the game found its perfect platform in these leagues as people could now take loyalties based on not just their countries, but also on the basis of their cities, favourite players and clubs. And why not, this was the time when people saw the likes of the Gangulys and Pontings play together in the same colours, greats like Inzaman and Shane Bond doing what they do best and where Sehwag and Gambhir’s explosive batting was complemented by Glenn McGrath’s precision bowling.

It was the year when the behemoth offering from the BCCI, the Indian Premier League came into being. The IPL changed the scenario of T20 league cricket with the glamour and money that no one could fathom a few years back. Cricket rechristened itself as a mainstream profession which translated into tidy earnings for those gritty men who could not make it into the history books as greats despite their talent and hard work.

The first edition of the IPL stormed into the TV sets of millions and also infused the feeling of belonging to a particular city or a club. The result was the exponential growth in popularity of MS Dhoni in south India, Ricky Ponting in Kolkata and so on and so forth. It also brought out new faces to the big stage and earned berths to the likes of Amit Mishra and Manpreet Gony.