Starting with a big bang

It was perhaps fitting that the new world should challenge the old in the city of Bangalore, a place where old colonial clubs and buildings jostle with cool bars and swanky headquarters of software houses, writes Simon Hughes in the Daily Telegraph.

If Rahul Dravid were to suddenly break into a brief bhangra in between shadow cover drives nobody would be surprised, writes India Today's Sharda Ugra. In another piece she says that if Test matches are extinct two decades later, it will be because cricket—its governors, its players and its entire community—didn’t fight hard enough for them, didn’t believe them to be worth preserving.

For all the well-meaning - if belated - intentions, it was hard yesterday evening to imagine an international event in England matching the IPL for sheer unadulterated hype, writes Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

This child of hype and bombast needed some substance to make it credible, and it got that from the scimatar-like bat of Brendon McCullum, writes Dileep Premachandran in his Times blog.

Kunal Pradhan has a say in the Indian Express: "The excitement in the match will have to complement the pre-game frenzy for the IPL to hold the audience for 44 days. An abject surrender by the home team doesn’t help their cause."

Stephen Brenkley chips in with his views in the Independent: "India have been bold and if some of the figures would seem to suggest that the boldness strays into fiscal foolhardiness those involved can afford it."

Also check out Hindustan Times' interview with Geoffrey Hampson, the CEO of the Vancouver-based Live Current Media Group who are hosting IPL's official website. You can sample the official site here.