BCCI T10 and ISPL tennis-ball cricket: Batting for short-play formats

financialexpress.com:

The ISPL will be India’s first tennis ball cricket tournament to be played in a stadium. The first edition of the ISPL tennis ball cricket tournament will be played over March 6-15. The idea is to provide young players from the grassroots level a national level platform. Six clubs—owned by the likes of Amitabh Bachchan (Mumbai), Ram Charan (Hyderabad), Hrithik Roshan (Bengaluru), Suriya (Chennai), Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor (Kolkata) and Akshay Kumar (Srinagar)—will compete in the ISPL.

The selection committee will select 350 players for competition. Interested players must enroll on http://www.ispl-t10.com and submit their professional, personal details along with performance videos, photographs or clips. Shortlisted candidates will be invited for city trials. Those who qualify in the city trials will move to the next level of trials to be held in Mumbai on January 20-21—96 players will be selected for the February 2024 player auction. BCCI will not be involved in the ISPL.

BCCI is working its own T-10 league, which is scheduled to be launched between September and October 2024. 

The board is yet to decide whether franchises for the new leagues should be sold through a separate tender process or if existing Indian Premier League (IPL) franchises should be given the right of first refusal. 

This decision will impact the league’s ownership structure and its financial dynamics. 

As per the board, the T10 format is chosen to further elevate the popularity of cricket in the country—the wildly popular T20 format IPL recently achieved deca-corn status, and thus there are questions that the BCCI must first contend with, such as whether there should be an age-cap for players so that it doesn’t cannibalise the IPL format