In What Ways Does The Legends League Cricket Hope To Promote Women’s Empowerment?
In What Ways Does The Legends League Cricket Hope To Promote Women’s Empowerment? In India, the second season of Legends League Cricket is going on right now. After having games in Kolkata, Lucknow, and Delhi, the action has moved to Cuttack. All of the venues of Season 1 have had a lot of people, so it’s safe to say that the second one will also be a success, just like the first one. Before the Legends League game between the Bhilwara Kings and the Gujarat Giants, the League’s co-founder and CEO, Raman Raheja, talked about how successful he thinks the tournament will be and what the next steps will be.
“More than me enjoying, the fans are loving it. The idea of you know, bringing it to India — which is the home of world cricket now, most of the audience comes from India and the sub-continent. The idea was to make it big and India obviously, helps bring that up. The audience loves it and when the audience loves it, the story of the product’s success really starts to show up. It is quality cricket happening so it is really good,” said Raheja.
Women umpires – the key factor
It’s important to remember that women umpires have played a key role in all of the Legends League games so far and will continue to do so. The co-founder of the League explained why they chose to have women umpires.
“In fact, this idea was used by us in the first edition as well where women empowerment has been one of our key initiatives. We want to bring unique ways of involving women in sports. It is about the match officials as well, they are equally good as men’s umpires. It is a good success that we have seen because one of the umpires who was working with us last season, she was from Hong Kong and when she went back home, she literally had a celebrity status where girls are coming up and asking how they can become umpires and host international matches, which is a very good story,” said Raheja.
Tournament on Indian soil
The tournament was held for the first time in Oman, and it was a huge success. So, what brought the organizers to India?
“I would be lying if I said so (plans on hosting the second edition in India right from the very start). We had great success in Oman but we had a lot of fans for this event to be hosted in India. This is the 75th year of Indian independence and we felt as a league, we could support the celebrations by bringing the league to India. In the month of July we decided, if everything permits, we should be hosting it in India. And that’s exactly how the plan changed from Oman to India,” said Raheja.
After the games in Cuttack, the rest of the tournament would be held at the Barkatullah Khan Stadium in Jodhpur. The last international game played there was India vs. West Indies in 2002, which was a long time ago. So, why did the organizers pick a stadium where an international game hasn’t been played in more than 20 years?
“We started from Kolkata, Lucknow, Delhi, Cuttack and now we would go to Jodhpur. Jodhpur has not hosted any international match for the last 20 years. That is the one objective that we want to promote the game, especially in the regions, where there are huge followers but there is limited cricket happening there. International cricket may not be possible to take into smaller centres regularly so we decided to support and compliment the active cricket, and that is how Jodhpur was selected,” said Raheja.
More in the Legends League Cricket
The League Co-Founder and CEO also said that the league will just focus on getting more legends to join and that he doesn’t want to hurt the cricket ecosystem as it is now.“Our business model is about players who have retired, we want to build an ecosystem of those cricketers who do not get assignments like commentary or coaching but have done so much for the country or club cricket, those are the ones we want to rope in. Our business model revolves around that. It is about the entire ecosystem of the legends — be it umpires as well. We do not want to interfere with the current cricket system,” said Raheja.