As many of you maybe aware, we made some substantial changes to our event formats earlier this year and a key decision was to feature a prominent sport or physical fitness and wellbeing activity. To create some fanfare around this, we started with flash dances as tribute to every IPL cricket team by their fans on the 10th anniversary of IPL this April (video link).
https://youtu.be/AFAlM_XkBds
The next step to take this further was to develop our very own version of a Premier League style cricket tournament among the UK Indian community. To support us in this we were glad to find an experienced partner Croydon Cricket Club. Hence the idea of an I for India cricket Premier League came to fruition in the UK on 15th July 2018.
We initially wanted 8 teams to mirror an IPL type of format in similar colourful cricket gear. However, as we announced the plans and commenced registrations, the teams came pouring in and we ended up with 12 enthusiastic teams. Given that our objective was to encourage sport among the Indian community, we gladly accepted them all and scaled up our format to 12 teams with additional pitches, cricket uniforms etc.
The 12 teams we had on the day were:
1. Croydon Super Kings 2. Kenton Knight Riders 3. M4 Indians 4. Slough Sunrisers 5. Spartan’s XI Bracknell 6. Royal Croydon Blasters 7. Crazy Daredevils 8. CCC Tuskers 9. Wild Warriors 10. Gully Lions Cricketers 11. Orpington Royal Ocelots 12. Croydon Chargers
The teams were classified into 4 Groups – North, South, East and West, with each team having at least 2 qualifying matches within their group with one top team from each group making the quarter finals.
Each team had a squad of 15 and we had all teams arriving to register by 9 a.m. and change into their cricket gear provided on the day. By 10 am we started the kick-off matches across 4 pitches in the massive grounds of Croygas and the entire grounds seemed like a rainbow of colours with 8 teams and 4 matches ongoing simultaneously.
The first half of the day was largely the qualifiers, and the post-lunch sessions comprising the knockout rounds of semi-final and the finals at around 5 pm with the day concluding at 7 pm. It was great to see the energy, cheering calls and competitive spirits of the teams at many occasions during the day and we even had some very close and clinching games especially in the qualifying rounds with teams arriving at a tie and close decisions on run rate etc. And the spectacular (albeit very warm) day made the tournament even better …all in all, a great day and many great games of cricket and a new event format successfully concluded for I for India !!
For those of you who could not attend, here is a collection of pictures to bring the day to life for you…we hope you are able to join us in person at our next event.
We are very grateful to the twin venues of Croygas and Wallington Sports Clubs for such a magnificent venue option for this full day tournament. We would like to place on record our thanks and gratitude to the following tireless and selfless volunteers on the day, for a stellar job with score-keeping, umpiring, without whom this event would not have been possible:
Mahesh Vaidyanathan, Murali Ramadoss, G Narayanan, Rajesh, Sathya
It is worth mentioning that some of our volunteers are professional ECB umpires who spared their valuable time for us on the day for which we indeed very grateful.
Following the finals, we had some wonderful trophies to give away across a number of categories – including a special one to encourage young talents in some teams who had brought their children also to play for their teams. The following were the awards and results for the day :
1. Winning Team: Croydon Chargers led by Vaidhy and Alan 2. Runners Up: Kenton Knight Riders, led by Kunal 3. Best Batsman: Kuldeep (Kenton Knight Riders) 4. Best Bowler: Vikrant (Croydon Chargers) 5. Best Wicket Keeper: Srinivas (Croydon Chargers) 6. Best Allrounder: Lawrence (Crazy Daredevils) 7. Most Sixers: Dinesh (M4 Indians) 8. Emerging Talents: Siddarth Iyer, Aditya Krishna, Nikaash Arulanand, Raghav Commandur and Anirudh Murali
The event has indeed motivated us very much to continue the sports and physical fitness agenda and we hope to come up with similar and varied formats in this space and appreciate any thoughts and ideas and support you can offer.