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Today's big event in town is India XI and World XI clashing in the finals of the ICL 20s World Series Cricket Tournament being played at the Lal Bahadur Stadium. This tournament has seen many twists and turns. The favorites, the strong Pakistan XI, getting knocked out of the final, and the underdogs India XI, after losing their first match disastrously, managing to win their other three matches convincingly, have added plenty of spice to the tournament, and Indian XI are now tagged favorites ahead of World XI, which has a galaxy of world stars.
Chris Cairns is the captain of the World XI team. The other members of the team are Russel Arnold, Marvan Atapattu, Upul Chandana, Matthew Elliot, Andrew Hall, Chris Harris, Ian Harvey, Michael Kasprowicz, Jimmy Maher, Damien Martyn, Daryl Tuffey, Johan van der Wath and Lou Vincent (wk).
The India XI side will be captained by R Sathish, and will have Abbas Ali, Love Ablish, Abu Nechim, Stuart Binny, Rohan Gavaskar, Abhishek Jhunjhunwala, Ibrahim Khaleel (wk), Thiru Kumaran, Ali Murtaza, Raviraj Patil, S Saravanan, TP Singh, TP Sudhindhra, Jamaluddin Syed Mohammed and G Vignesh making up the rest of the squad.
Tonight, the winners will get a prize money of Rs. 1.25 crores and the losing finalists will pocket Rs. 75 lakhs. The third team Pakistan XI will take home Rs. 50 lakhs.
The Indian Cricket League (ICL) is a private cricket league that runs parallel to the existing cricket league managed by the BCCI. It is promoted by Zee Telefilms (part of Subash Chandra's Essel group), and was set up with a Rs. 100 crore (Rs. 1 billion) corpus. The inaugural season of the ICL was in November 2007. Since then, it has organised three tournaments and this is the fourth one. The Essel Group is also planning to set up cricket academies all over the country.
The match will be played under the floodlights, with 20 overs each side. Entry to the matches is by tickets of Rs. 100 and Rs. 300 per head, available at specific Music World outlets and Walden (Begumpet). Please contact 3988-0288 for further details.
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