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In what now appears to be hurtling towards a major tussle, Shah Rukh’s production company Red Chillies Entertainment has put its foot down at the face of protests from the Cricket Association of Bengal’s (CAB) dissidents over the sharing of Eden Gardens’ tickets for the IPL carnival.
Trashing claims from the CAB’s Dalmiya-led opposition over a “fairer” ticket-sharing arrangement with the CAB, a top functionary from Red Chillies who is directly handling SRK’s Kolkata IPL chapter has told The Indian Express that they want the BCCI to intervene and sort the dispute out as soon as possible.
“We don’t want to get into the CAB’s internal matters, whatever they are turning out to be. And we don’t want to know in detail what is exactly going on there. All that we want is that the BCCI should ensure that we get a clean Eden Gardens ground for the tournament. We don’t want to know about the CAB’s internal problems,” the top Red Chillies official told this daily today.
Shah Rukh’s company bagged the rights to Eden for a Rs 10-crore booty, and has offered to share with the CAB 20 percent of the 86,000 tickets for free, while keeping the rest 80 percent for public sale.
Trouble began when Dalmiya & Co protested last Tuesday at the CAB’s special general meeting, claiming that the Prasun Mukherjee-led CAB administration should ask Red Chillies to share with the state body over 50 percent of the tickets for the seven matches it hosts.
However, Kolkata team owner Shah Rukh is in no mood to compromise on the 80-20 ticket-sharing arrangement. Says the Red Chillies official: “We have decided to share 20 percent of the tickets with the CAB, that’s it. We don’t know what happened after that. We hope the BCCI ensures that everything is fine with the venue.”
Shah Rukh’s Red Chillies owns the Kolkata team for the 44-day Twenty20 IPL tournament, which is slated to begin on April 18. Eden Gardens, one of the eight venues for the event, is slated to host seven home matches of the Sourav Ganguly-led Kolkata team’s 14 league matches.
Even as Shah Rukh took a tough stand on the IPL impasse, throwing the ball in the BCCI’s court, the CAB top brass as of now has no idea how to sort the matter out. Says CAB joint-secretary Samar Paul: “We don’t know right now what’s the status, but we are sure something will be worked out sooner or later. From their (Red Chillies Entertainment) point of view, they may be right over the 80-20 ratio, but we have to take into account everything in the present scenario and work something out. We need to discuss the matter with the Board.”
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