Lalit Modi has assured cricket fans he has no intention of letting the Indian Premier League hog the strike and impact on other forms of the game.

Some cricket purists may well be shocked to hear the IPL chief. But the brainchild behind the Twenty20 tournament is keen to see his ‘baby’ remain a seven-week event so that it does not affect the first-class game.

“We are going to have the current limitation (in the IPL’s duration), and we are happy to live with that,” Modi said.

“Then (if we make it a longer tournament) you are going to starting to hurt the other forms of the game.

“We chose the window specifically to be off-season in India, April-May is typically off season in India I don’t think we are going to be able to change that.

Even with 94 games scheduled in the 2011 season, Modi said the season will only be 51 days long.

“The next season is only over seven weeks instead of six.”

Modi also clean bowled the suggestion that with all the money and glamour now associated with the Twenty20 game and, more specifically, the IPL, Test cricket will start to die.

“The younger generation was mostly moving away from the game of cricket, we have brought them back into the game,” he said. “Test cricket is our bread and butter which people don’t understand, we are never going to compromise on Test cricket.

When I talked about, you know, (how) we have to do something about Test cricket, it’s in the other countries that Test cricket is going down.

In India, our ratings are going up, we have been tracking that year by year, in fact, we get paid highest for Test cricket.”

THROUGHOUT this year’s IPL 7DAYS will be following the fortunes of Kings XI Punjab.

Now, we know as journalists we have to be objective at all times, and avoid the tunnel-vision trap most fans fall in to.
And rest assured we shall be doing our best to do just that.

But throughout the tournament we shall report on how the men from Mohali are doing and then offering a wider round-up of how their rivals are getting on.