In exclusive remarks to PakPassion.net, Sandiip Bhammer spoke of his delight at what the SLPL had achieved so far as well as plans for future editions of this tournament. Read this interviw to get an insight of SLPL future and what it means for T20 leagues around the world.

By Saj Sadiq (12th September, 2012)

The inaugural edition of the Sri Lankan Premier League (SLPL) has been widely regarded as a success. With 7 teams consisting of some major international players competing in a T20 format, the SLPL has been lauded by players and observers alike as a worthy stablemate for the lucrative Indian Premier League.

From excellent facilities for players to the quality of cricket on display, the SLPL lead by its energetic CEO,Sandiip Bhammer, appears to have made a lasting impression on all concerned and is set to become a much anticipated fixture on the cricket calendar.

Clearly satisfied with the outcome of the tournaments initial version and in exclusive remarks to PakPassion.net, Sandiip Bhammer spoke of his delight at what the SLPL had achieved so far as well as plans for future editions of this tournament.



PakPassion.net: After the 1st season of the SLPL, you must be a content and happy man, what is your assessment of the first season?

Sandeep Bhammer: We are very pleased with how the first season of the Mahindra SLPL went. We had a number of objectives, and to the extent that those objectives were met, that became a barometer for assessing how we had done. I’ll actually talk to you about some of those historic achievements that have come through as a consequence of the first tournament being held.

Number 1, the first season resulted in the selection of two young Sri Lankan cricketers, namely Akila Dananjaya and Dilshan Munaweera being chosen for the first time to represent Sri Lanka owing to their fantastic performances in the first edition of the SLPL. These cricketers had played very little first-class cricket, if any at all. The fact that the tournament was able to unearth two future stars of the Sri Lankan cricket team was very satisfying and the hope is that the tournament will continue to unearth these future stars who will prove themselves to be among the top world class cricketers that Sri Lanka would have delivered to the cricketing world.

The second thing was that the SLPL matches were shown live on television in about 80 countries and on the best international platforms, and the matches were even being hosted on You Tube. Having the tournament played in Sri Lanka live and putting them on the best platforms allowed for a lot of non-national cricketers in Sri Lanka to be seen in action along with the best international stars. The matches were extremely well followed, particularly in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, and mostly in Pakistan because this was like a home league away from home for Pakistanis. 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating because if you actually see what happened during the tournament, the Pakistani cricketers actually did wonders to uplift the standard of the tournament. There were more than a million viewers across You Tube and basically the SLPL was among the most trending topics on Twitter. Even the official tournament Face Book page had more than 33,000 fans in only the first month of the official site going live. 

Now, it’s one thing to get fans, but basically trying to get fans who are interactive is a metric that we tend to use to determine whether the fans are really enjoying what they are seeing. We did a social media study to see whether the fans that were actually watching the SLPL were “active” fans, and as a percentage of the overall fan base, the percentage of “active” fans was a much higher number relative to the other T20 leagues out there.

In addition to that, 84 Sri Lankan domestic cricketers and 50 international cricketers from 7 test playing countries participated in the first season, and they all received a significant annual payment, which will go a very long way in making the league commercially attractive for the players that were participating. The SLPL also provided sizeable economic gains to the field of tourism and hospitality within Sri Lanka, at a time which is usually a lean period. It is estimated that the revenue brought into the country just through direct accommodation costs alone was in the vicinity of about 130 million Sri Lankan Rupees, and approximately 6,000 room nights were created during that time. 

Finally, I think the fact that we had some of the best sponsors in the tournament such as ‘Pepsi’ and ‘Mahindra & Mahindra’, which is actually an Indian multinational enjoying a leadership position in various sectors of the economy, and is almost valued at $15.4 billion market capitalisation, came in as the lead sponsor. 

If you look at all of these various things in their entirety, it would basically allow for me to say clearly that the SLPL was in the range of an 8-8.5 out of 10 in terms of its success. 

Where the SLPL did not do well was on crowds, but having said that the crowds incrementally built in every game over the prior games. So by the time we reached the semi-finals and final we had 25,000. So while the SLPL started off with a low number of people attending the games, as word spread the SLPL actually ended up being a fantastic tournament for people to come in and enjoy their weekends or weekday evenings. That was clearly evident in the fact that the latter part of the tournament actually had very large crowds coming in and in fact the final, which was a pity it got rained off, we actually were playing to fully packed audiences. That was one negative and the other negative was of course the fact that some players got injured, and some of them had to go back home midway through the tournament to attend to personal matters, which obviously won’t get repeated from one year to another, and so when that situation does not arise next year, You’ll actually have the right quality players coming in and playing as well, and that will add to the glamour of the tournament in that year.
 

PakPassion.net: With regards to your plans and goals for future tournaments and specifically in regards to the number of teams, are you looking to expand the number of teams or do you think seven is the right number of teams for the SLPL?

Sandeep Bhammer: The SLPL was created to allow all nine of the provinces within Sri Lanka with the ability to field a team. In the first three years, the idea was to keep it to seven. Seven was not a magic number and this was determined purposefully. If you look at the window over which seven teams played, mathematically, each team plays one another once, we're talking about roughly, 21 games. Then you have two semi-finals and a final which means 24 games before you get a result. If you include all nine-provinces and each team plays the other once, we're talking about 36 games with two semi-finals and a final. The window becomes very long and the whole point of the tournament is to play in a window where foreign players are not doing anything (are available). If the foreign players are to come in and make this a success and given how packed the calendar is now, it's difficult to play this tournament with nine teams in the first three years.

The second thing is that in order to create nine teams you are going to have to further again re-shuffle players. This becomes very confusing for the fanbase because you want the fanbase to be built following a particular team and you only go out and take players after two or three years have gone by, after people are relatively comfortable with which team they want to support as a fan. If you start introducing new teams and keep shifting the players very frequently it will cause a lot of confusion in trying to build a sticky fanbase - since some of the fans actually follow players rather than teams. To answer your question, we will stick to seven teams in the first three years and then think of adding two more teams in future years. 


PakPassion.net: The weather has played a significant role in the outcome of this tournament - Have you considered holding this tournament in a different part of the year or is it fixed on the August schedule?

Sandeep Bhammer: If you look at the total number of games played in the SLPL, there was a total of 24 games played. In that, there were two games that were washed out and two whose results were determined by the Duckworth-Lewis method. So you are talking about a total of four games out of 24 that were washed out by the weather. If you tried to play 24 games in any other part of the sub-continent at this time of the year, you wouldn't have been able to play this many games because of the rain. 

Sri Lanka is relatively better as about 80-85% of the games got played. You cannot play this tournament in any other part of the year because you don’t have a window as the international players required in the tournament will not be available as their own countries will be playing bilateral series where they will be required to perform their duties. The only way you can play it is in August and in August the only place you can play is in Sri Lanka. Yes, you will have a few days here and there (affected by rain) but by and large, you will be able to play the majority of the tournament here in Sri Lanka. It's very unfortunate that we had rain that affected the semi-final and final games but during the league matches, we had very little to no rain.


PakPassion.net: At the start of the tournament, there was a corruption allegation against one of the franchise owners. The ICC were handling that matter. Can you give us an update with regards to what's happening with that?

Sandeep Bhammer: That was actually before the tournament started. It was reported to us and we went to the ICC regarding it. The ICC is engaged fully in the process of research and nothing has been communicated to us. The fact that it was reported to the ICC even prior to the tournament taking off meant that the levels of vigilance around the tournament increased dramatically and we therefore stayed away from all such controversies with no such issues reported again. So it worked out well for us as we were alerted to the situation prior to start of the tournament.


PakPassion.net: Can you confirm that all players have been paid and your comments regarding what FICA are saying?

Sandeep Bhammer: FICA isn't saying that the players haven't been paid across all the teams. They are saying that one particular franchise where a few of the players are yet to be paid - a (remaining) balance of the payment. As far as we're concerned, if you look at the tournament, we haven't received any complaints from any of the players that they haven't been paid, and neither has the Sri Lankan Cricket Board. So every time we hear about a player being not paid, we are hearing about this from a statement that FICA has made - we are not hearing this from the player himself! 

To the extent that we haven't been told by a player that he hasn't been paid, how do we assess that they have been paid or not? Do we go to the players proactively asking them if they have been paid or not, or do we wait for the player to come back to us to say we haven't been paid so look into the issue? The fact of the matter is that no one has come back to us from a player perspective and told us that I havent been paid. So what action do we take? If at all - on anyone.


PakPassion.net: Overall, the SLPL has started well and it sounds as if it is going to be the start of something big that will get bigger year on year?

Sandeep Bhammer: Yes, that is our hope. The reality is that we wanted to provide a controversy-free tournament where the quality of cricket was good and where the players went back as tournament ambassadors and spoke about their experience in playing the SLPL in a good way. That seems to be what is happening as even the interviews that I have seen that are being done by your own journalists, it seems that player comments have been very positive. 

That's not just across Pakistani cricketers but there have also been interviews done with non-Pakistani cricketers such as Scott Styris, Jacob Oram, and Shiv Chanderpaul - all of them have given rave reviews of the tournament. They have also said that apart from the crowds initially, the tournament had a lot of high quality cricket that was played. We're very happy and hoping InshaAllah (God-willing) that the tournament is bigger and better than what it was the first year.

Discuss!