While the whole country is engrossed in the matches of IPL-2010, students of the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (Cept) University, Ahmedabad, have been busy with a premier league of another kind — that of football.
The Cept premier league, which will climax on Sunday when the winners of Saturday’s semi-final matches clash for the championship, had its own ‘managers’ bidding for players with ‘points’ (not money). The organisers, the managers and the players are, of course, all drawn from the student body of Cept University.
In the semis — which were to be played after 8 pm on Saturday —2 Apples take on Footloosers in one match while Desi D battle it out with Red Devils in the other.
The league matches began on the university campus on March 6. Every day for the last seven days, the Cept campus turned into a veritable football stadium between 8 pm and midnight, to host three action-filled matches. The teams — all of which have only Cept students as players —have names like Desi D (the D is for Dhurandhar), Clan of the Kings, Two Apples, Raving Rascals, Pokemon, Footloosers (Buland) and Red Devils.
The Cept premier league has been organised by the student activity councils (SACs) of the university’s School of Architecture and the School of Building Science and Technology.
The ‘organisers’ short-listed 45 players from among the university’s students and appointed seven ‘managers’ who could bid for six players with points. Each manager was allotted 600 ‘points’.
While the worth of the players was tagged at 50 to 74 points on the basis of their performance during practice on the campus, the price of some players rose to the maximum of 150 points during the bidding. If more than one manager was willing to pay 150 points for a particular player, it was left to the player to decide which team he wanted to play for.
“The entire bidding process was great fun,” said Prashant Bhagchandani, a CEPT student and an avid football enthusiast. It was Bhagchandani who, along with Aditya Oza, Parshva Shah, Saptarshi Mitra and Geet George, came up with the whole idea of organising a football premier league.
Geet George said the entire event had cost around Rs13,000, the money having come form the SACs. “Out of this amount, we set aside Rs7,500 as the prize money,” George said. As regards the league’s future, he said they intended to organise it again on a much larger scale and with better prize money. “The league has evoked much excitement among students and the matches have drawn large crowds from the campus,” he said. The prizes for the winning team include those for the best defender, best goalkeeper and a ‘golden boot’, among others.
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