The brand new edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) is all set to get rolling from April 9 (Friday) when defending champion Mumbai Indians lock horns with Royal Challengers Bangalore at the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai. Meanwhile, with the pandemic in view, BCCI has decided to stage IPL 2021 in six cities – Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore. All the matches will be played behind closed doors.
Meanwhile, BCCI was forced to shift the tournament to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, the fans will be glad to have their favorite cricketing extravaganza back in the country. The eight participating franchises will meet each other twice in a round-robin format during the league phase before the top four battle out in the Playoffs, followed by the pinnacle clash.
The evening games of IPL 2021 are scheduled to start each day at 7:30 pm IST, while on double-headers days, the afternoon fixtures will commence at 3:30 pm IST. In all, there will be a total of 11 doubleheaders where six teams will play three afternoon matches and two sides will play two matches in the afternoon.
With the fans limited to watching the matches on their TV sets or streaming them via various apps, the role of a commentator becomes even more important. Star Sports Network, the holder of the IPL broadcast and streaming rights, has announced an illustrious panel of 100 commentators for the marquee tournament. They will broadcast the matches of IPL 2021 in eight different languages – English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, and Marathi.
Here is the full list of commentators for IPL 2021:
World Feed: Matthew Hayden, Kevin Pietersen, Michael Slater, Danny Morrisson, Ian Bishop, Harsha Bhogle, Simon Doull, Mpumelelo Mbangwa, Daren Ganga, Sunil Gavaskar, Mark Nicholas, Ajit Agarkar, Nick Knight, Deep Dasgupta, Rohan Gavaskar, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, Murli Kartik, Anjum Chopra, Lisa Sthalekar, Mel Jones and Alan Wilkins
Dugout: Scott Styris, Brett Lee, Dominic Cork, Brian Lara, Graeme Swann.
Talent joining remotely for few matches as a guest: Kevin Pietersen, Shane Watson, Ross Taylor, Dale Steyn, Nasser Hussain
Hindi: Aakash Chopra, Nikhil Chopra, Gautam Gambhir, Ajit Agarkar, Irfan Pathan, Parthiv Patel, RP Singh, Deep Dasgupta, Sunil Gavaskar
Tamil: Abhinav Mukund, Subramaniam Badrinath, Hemang Badani, Yo Mahesh, Sadagopan Ramesh, Radhakrishnan Sreenivasan, Muthuraman R, K V Sathyanarayanan, RJ Balaji, Krishnamachari Srikanth, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, and Russel Arnold
Kannada: Venkatesh Prasad, GK Anil Kumar, Akhil Balachandra, Srinivasa Murthy, Bharat Chipli, Vijay Bharadwaj, Vinay Kumar
Telugu: Venugopal Rao, Ashish Reddy, MSK Prasad, Kaushik NC, Kalyan Krishna, and Sashikant Avulapalli
Bengali: Ranadeb Bose, Joydeep Mukherjee, Boria Majumdar, Sanjeeb Mukherjea, Saradindu Mukherjee, Laxmi Ratan Shukla, Gautam Bhattacharya, and Debashish Datta
Marathi: Vinod Kambli, Sandeep Patil, Amol Muzumdar, Snehal Pradhan, Kunal Date, Prasanna Sant, and Chaitanya Sant
Malayalam: Shiyas Mohammed, Vishnu Hariharan, CM Deepak, Sony Cheruvathur, Tinu Yohannan, and Reiphi Gomez
