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Strategic Break Periods Spelt Out in IPL

MUMBAI — The Indian Premier League has fixed a five-minute period, split into two equal halves, for the mandatory strategic time-outs during the third edition of the Twenty20 event starting March 12.

“The batting team would have to take the 2 and a half minute time-out mandatory between the sixth and eighth overs while the fielding side would have to take the time-out between the 11^th and 16^th overs,” IPL chairman and commissioner Lalit Modi said here 
on Thursday.

Modi said the decision to specify the overs for taking the mandatory stoppages, lasting 2.5 minutes each, had been arrived at after having a look at the time-outs in other games like basketball and American football (NFL).

“We have found out that these are the times the batting and fielding teams normally rearrange 
their strategies.

The third season of the IPL can be seen by cricket fans in the United Kingdom on ITV, Modi said.

“The UK market has traditionally been very difficult to crack and Sky TV has always been difficult to deal with and that’s why this deal with ITV, which is the oldest commercial broadcaster in the UK, is very huge for us,” said Modi at a media conference here.

“This is the first deal with a free-to-air broadcaster outside India. It’s an extremely important deal for us. ITV, which has twenty million subscribers, has not broadcast cricket for a long time,” the IPL chief said.

“The deal at present is only for the 2010 season,” he added.

Meanwhile, IPL awarded the exclusive rights for mobile match alerts, SMS, MMS and other services to vRock Mobile Communications — a move that would curtail telecom operators from generating and distributing match-related content on their own.

As per the agreement, vRock Mobile, a value-added services firm, will have the exclusive rights for creating and transmitting mobile content such as SMS, MMS, alerts, games, live audio commentary and others related to the upcoming IPL matches.—