Tactical time-outs could be reduced - Modi

Lalit Modi, the IPL commissioner, has said there is a possibility that the tactical time-out in the middle of each team's innings could be changed from one interval of seven and a half minutes to two breaks of two and a half minutes each for the semi-finals and final of the second season of the IPL.

"It's not frozen yet but we are looking at two aspects. There will be two two-and-a-half-minutes break per innings, so the break in all during an innings will be of five minutes," Modi told NDTV. "The first two-and-a-half-minute break will be just after the Powerplay [6 overs] and the second to be taken by the fielding side at any time.

"It happens in every sport, there is a strategy break and everything. But 7.5 minutes may look like a bit longer, so we are seeing how we can reduce it down to five minutes" However, he said that the idea was yet to be ratified by the tournament's technical committee.

The tactical time-out has played a part in shifting the momentum in the Twenty20 games and has usually benefited the fielding team with the batting side losing wickets in the overs immediately after the break. It was criticised by Sachin Tendulkar, the Mumbai Indians captain who felt that the breaks were "hampering the momentum of a team", Kings XI Punjab coach Tom Moody and VB Chandrasekhar, Chennai Super Kings' head of cricket operations. Other experts were also not certain of how much value it added to the game.

Kolkata Knight Riders coach John Buchanan had called for the number of overseas players in a XI to be increased from four but Modi said it was not going to happen. "This is the Indian Premier League," he told the Indian Express. "The focus is on getting local talent and I have shoved away the idea of increasing the number of foreigners."

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South Africa prepares for biggest test as IPL crosses continents

Just in case anyone doubted the effort that has gone into shifting the Indian Premier League from one continent to another, Lalit Modi, the league's chairman, commissioner and ubiquitous public face, spelled it out. "It's taken them eight years here to get ready for the 2010 soccer World Cup," he said. "We've had 29 days." When play gets under way at Newlands today with the first two games out of 59 spread across six weeks, it will be a triumph for ambition, drive and the non-stop rise of Twenty20 cricket.

If Modi is to be believed, the IPL is not merely a sporting phenomenon of a very modern kind, but a force for good in an insecure country whose new democracy is not even two decades old. After the Lahore terrorist attacks on Sri Lanka's cricketers in March persuaded the Indian government that hosting the world's best players at the same time as staging a drawn-out general election was a recipe for trouble, South Africa happily stepped into the breach. Soon, they will be old hands at this kind of thing.

Two years ago, the country hosted the inaugural World Twenty20. Next month comes the British and Irish Lions rugby team, and later this year cricket's Champions Trophy, another refugee from the perceived dangers of the subcontinent. Next year, it will be football's World Cup. So eager are South Africa to please that when Modi declared on Thursday that the IPL would boost the local economy by between 1.5 and 2 billion rand (up to £150m), few seemed inclined to question the sums.

No matter that the Newlands-based Cape Cobras stand to earn peanuts – one million rand (just under £75,000) – for staging eight matches at short notice at the end of a busy domestic season. To be seen to help is what counts. "If it all works out it will be a reminder of how good we are at staging international events," said Andre Odendaal, the Cobras chief executive.

But business ventures – and the IPL remains very much business before pleasure – have their own ruthlessness, and the reality on the ground in the week leading up to the cricket has not quite tallied with Modi's sunny assessment of "smooth sailing". Much has been made of the sellouts at Cape Town for the weekend's two double-headers, rather less of the Newlands suiteholders persuaded to sacrifice their private boxes to allow a comfier vantage point for the IPL's endless stream of grandees.

Suiteholders at the Wanderers in Johannesburg are said to have been less compliant, and there is an underlying resentment in some quarters at the IPL's apparent sense of entitlement. Modi's decision to introduce compulsory time-outs after 10 overs of each innings, a naked means of creating more airspace for TV commercials, has gone down badly with the host broadcaster Sony, who were already fuming after Modi doubled their TV rights fee following last year's successful launch in India.

It is a financial sleight of hand that this week allowed Modi to proclaim the IPL was "recession-proof". And, with the world's financial markets hanging on for dear life, he has also declared that all eight franchises will have made a profit by the end of the tournament. The plan is to roll out one or two more teams either next year or in 2011, although Modi does at least draw the line at franchises building their own stadiums. Sensibly, perhaps, he achieved a PR coup yesterday by visiting a school in Athlone, an underprivileged part of Cape Town, where – with Kevin Pietersen, Shane Warne, the Bollywood star Preity Zinta et al looking on – he handed over a cheque in front of screaming pupils for 100,000 rand.

In fact, the South African public may well be sufficiently interested to make the tournament work. An impromptu warm-up game last week between the Cape Cobras and the Rajasthan Royals, Shane Warne's reigning IPL champions, drew a crowd of over 8,000 and Modi has claimed ticket sales will weather the initial burst of curiosity. Sixteen games – more than anywhere – have been scheduled for Durban, home to 80% of South Africa's 1.5 million Indian population. The hope is that the underwhelming open-top bus parade through Cape Town on a drizzly Thursday is not some kind of omen.

All that is left is the actual cricket, easily forgotten amid the hype. A repeat of last year's opening-night 158 from Kolkata Knight Riders' Brendon McCullum would go down a treat, but near-autumnal South African pitches may not produce the totals of 180-plus that peppered the 2008 competition in India.

In theory, the sides with the most South Africans begin with an advantage. On that score, Bangalore Royal Challengers, dismal last year, look well-placed, with Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher, Dale Steyn, Roelof van der Merwe and Dillon du Preez all coached by another local, Ray Jennings.

Their captain is Pietersen, who knows the conditions here pretty well too. "It's worked out perfectly for us with Ray as coach as well," he said. "I'm like a kid out here surrounded by all these legends. I just hope the English guys learn a few tricks and take them back to the World Twenty20."

England's players missed out last year. Now they will get to see what all the fuss is about. If the IPL can work in another country, we may just have to start taking the breast-beating Modi at his word.

IPL games to take 15 minutes more

Fans who have become accustomed to Twenty20 matches lasting just three hours are in for a surprise during the second season of the IPL - they will now last three and a quarter hours. Part of the appeal of the shortest form of the game is the non-stop action but IPL games will now take longer and there will be no action at all during the added time.

The IPL are planning to market the added time as an 'innovation' by calling it a tactical 'time out' but the fact that each innings will now come to a halt for seven-and-a-half minutes after exactly 10 overs makes it neither tactical nor, indeed, practical.

"It is a move that is driven completely and totally by commercial objectives," a senior production official told Cricinfo. "It is designed purely to make even more money by selling airtime. Nobody could argue that this adds any cricketing value to the tournament or that it can be in the viewers' interest, either in the stadium or watching at home," the official said.

The seven-and-a-half minute break will see the stadium crowd entertained by a live band while television audiences will watch three, separate two-and-a-half minute segments, two of which will be sold commercially. The third will show the teams taking drinks and discussing 'tactics' to add some validity to the argument for the 'time out.'

While one section will be compulsory, mainstream advertising, the other will be set aside for 'special projects'. Queen Rania of Jordan, well known for her agenda of social reform and progression, will lead the way with a series of short films aimed at African children expounding the importance of education.

The IPL can justifiably claim that the project is well intentioned and for a good cause. And at approximately $1million per episode, it's also very lucrative. There are 118 two-and-half minute slots for sale.

Production teams have also been told that they need to fit 2000 seconds (around 33 minutes) of advertising into every match, a task described by a different member of the production team as "virtually impossible."

"It means taking about 40 seconds of advertising between every over and close to a minute at the fall of every wicket. It's OK in theory but it hardly ever works like that. If a team only loses two or three wickets, or the match finishes in 15 overs, we are in trouble," the same production official said.

In March, the IPL signed a fresh US $1.8 billion broadcast-rights deal for 10 years with Multi Screen Media (MSM), which operates under the Sony umbrella, and World Sports Group (WSG). The matches are being telecast by Supersport, the South African broadcaster which holds the tournament rights in that country

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