Custom Search

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Royal Challengers Bangalore




Royal Challengers Bangalore (also referred to as RCB) is an Indian Premier League team, based in the city of Bangalore. The team is owned by the liquor magnate Vijay Mallya, through his flagship firm UB Group.Brijesh Patel is the CEO of the RCB and Kevin Pietersen is the captain. Rahul Dravid is the team's Icon Player, while Ray Jennings, the former South African coach, is the coach.

Indian Premier League is a cricket tournament being organised by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and backed by the International Cricket Council (ICC).For the inaugural tournament held in Apr-Jun 2008, the BCCI had finalised a list of 8 teams who will be participating in the tournament. The teams representing 8 different cities of India, including Bangalore, were put up on auction in Mumbai on 20 February 2008 and the Bangalore team was won by Vijay Mallya, who paid US$111.6 million for it. This was the second highest bid for a team in the IPL, next only to Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries' bid of $111.9 million for the Mumbai team. Bollywood actresses Katrina Kaif and Deepika Padukone, and Sandalwood film stars Ramya and Upendra are the brand ambassadors of the team.

The team won 4 matches in this season, losing 10 matches and managed to secure only the last but one position in the points table. Only one of their batsman, Rahul Dravid managed to score more than 300 runs in the tournament and they had to even bench their costliest foreign player, Jacques Kallis for few of the matches due to his poor form. The string of failures mid-way through the season led to the sacking of the CEO, Charu Sharma who was replaced with Brijesh Patel.Even coach Venkatesh Prasad was about to be sacked, but he saved his job by publicly apologising for the team's failure. Vijay Mallya went on to publicly criticise Dravid and Sharma for the failures by saying that they had not selected the right team. He regretted that he had made a mistake by not getting involved in the selection of the team.They were the only team in the IPL to try out 11 opening combinations in 14 games. Eventually the chief cricketing officer, Martin Crowe resigned. From 2009 IPL session onwards the team will be coached by former South Africa Coach Ray Jennings and Venkatesh Prasad will assist him as team's Bowling Coach.


No comments:

Post a Comment

free counters