Rajasthan Royals (RR) owner Manoj Badale has suggested adding more franchises in the Indian Premier League (IPL) to increase the reach of the league in all the corners. He has some more proposals to enlarge the popularity of the cash-rich league.
In IPL, every season eight teams participate in the game, except from 2011 to 2013 where more than eight teams participated in the annual T20 tournament. Badale believes that adding more teams will help the league grow further. Following this, he added that the league should organize some international matches which will extend the game abroad.
“We believe that eight is a good number of teams for the IPL given the length of the window and the logistics for all franchises and star. Adding a new franchise will, however, enable a new stadium to be played in, new fans to be deeply engaged in this amazing sport and more matches for our avid supporters, which are certainly beneficial to the game,” India.com cited agencies as quoting Badale as saying.
“We played the first and only ever international friendly in Lords in 2009 against Middlesex and would certainly be supportive of playing some friendly matches abroad each year,”
Rajasthan Royals in IPL 2020 auction
In the recently concluded auction, the Royals bought eleven players from the pool at Kolkata. RR has won only one title which was the inaugural edition of the Indian Premier League. Since then, the team hasn’t found a tournament-winning combination that can give them another title. In the match-fixing case of 2013, RR and CSK were banned for two years and could not participate in the 2016 and 2017 title.
The franchise bought players like Robin Uthappa, Jaydev Unadkat, Kartik Tyagi, Anuj Rawat, Oshane Thomas and David Miller among others. Australian cricketer Steve Smith will continue the captaincy for the next edition. RR owner said that the team has now the right combination for success.
“We believe we now have the right combination of captain and coach for success. We ran an extremely robust process through the summer to select Andrew McDonald and are very happy with the appointment, while in (Steve) Smith we have the captain with one of the best win records in the IPL,” he said.