High-profile IPL gets underway tomorrow

 The Shah Rukh Khan-owned Knight Riders and Vijay Mallya's Royal Challengers will kick off the 44-day twenty20 tournament that has several international stars playing alongside the best of Indian domestic cricket and under-19 rookies.Led by two former Indian captains -- Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid -- who currently don't have a fixed place in the ODI squad, it will be intriguing to see how the Knight Riders and Royal Challengers match up to each other in the floodlit Twenty20 contest.

  Knight Riders also features marauders like Australian skipper Ricky Ponting besides Indian teen pace sensation Ishant Sharma, who has just recovered from a finger injury. The Bangalore team may not have as a big a star as Ponting in its fold but the presence of players like South African all-rounder Jacques Kallis and Indian Test skipper Anil Kumble makes it a formidable unit.

 Kumble, though, is likely to miss the lung-opener, as he recuperates from a groin injury picked up during the recent series against South Africa. But more than the cricket, it is the whopping money at stake that has been making headlines. The winner of the tournament is all set to take home Rs 4 crore, while even the last-placed team would end up with Rs 40 lakh in its kitty. Millions were spent during the players' auction, which made some cricketers feel like livestock.

   The money on offer also ignited a debate on whether the players will be able to keep their country above IPL as a few weeks of cricket was offering them several folds more than what they are earning through their central contracts right now.  Players, as expected, denied that any such thought ever crossed their mind but the English cricketers' clamour to be in the IPL, even at the cost of their central contracts, suggested otherwise. 

 The issue of player-burnout was all but lost in the maddening millions and not one cricketer complained of how the 59-match tourney was going to rob them of a break in a choc-a-bloc international calendar.  Instead, there is already talk of creating a window for IPL in the Future Tours Program (FTP), a suggestion likely to get the ICC nod, given the BCCI's influence in the governing body.