Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh set to launch IPL on Hotstar in USA

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is all set to enter in its new decade and the new broadcasters Star India are leaving no stone unturned from their end. After bagging the broadcast rights of the tournament for a whopping amount, they also own the digital rights for the cash-rich T20 league in India. In a bid to popularise the game of cricket, they are launching IPL on Hotstar for the cricket fans in the United States of America (USA). However, the former spin-twins of India Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh are in New York for the announcement of the same.

The launching of IPL on Hotstar will take place in New York during the Cricfest on Saturday. It will be most likely attended by more than 1,500 cricket enthusiasts and will be held from 4 PM to 7 PM New York time. It will be an interactive event which will also include the batting cages, virtual reality cricket simulator, Indian street food vendors and the two special guests in Kumble and Harbhajan.

Celebration of cricket

According to Inside sport, reports earlier suggested that Hotstar will announce the IPL streaming in the US with the two stalwarts of the Indian cricket. Ipsita Dasgupta, the International president of Hotstar believed that the event will be the celebration of cricket.

“The event is quite a spectacle … really just a celebration of cricket. If you look at the community across the US, we started speaking to different cricket academies, associations, organizations. We realized there’s this huge unmet demand for events, activities, content and just a lot of excitement for people to get together,” she was quoted as saying by New York Post. Ipsita also added that they couldn’t think of a better venue than New York for the launching event of IPL given the nature of cricket played in the tournament.

“We’d love to believe that cricket will catch on in the US overall, but the immediate goal is to connect the hundreds of thousands of cricket lovers in the U.S. We’re really looking forward to having a mix of people, from really hard-core cricket enthusiasts to people who are just starting to get excited about cricket because it has more to do with their identity than knowing much about the game already,” she concluded.

Keep following CricTracker for more updates on IPL.