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PETER GRIFFITH

You and Sundar made multiple schedules to accommodate election days with black out days before and after polling days? Did you at
any point in time did you think you had to move this?
When we did the original schedule for IPL in 2009, way back in the summer of 2008, we knew the elections were coming, and we did
some research on the election dates and the polling and counting dates to have the information to ensure fl exibility whilst scheduling.

But you pretty much had to start all over again?
Yes, whenever I would get a call from Sundar about some new black out dates, the decision of “do we start all over again or do we try
and build from what we started?” arose. I think I did 3 or 4 new schedules and over a 100 variations in-between.

There was a lot of talk about it happening in England and in the last minute I think it swung in favor of South Africa. How?
We got to South Africa and we saw that the cricket authorities were right behind us, the government was right behind us and from my
perspective it was almost a bullet in the hand and we knew it was possible to do it there. We did not have much time and we knew we
had to get going straight away.

So you landed in South Africa you pretty much hit the ground running, didn’t you?
Yes, that’s right. We were lucky in sense that the preparation work had been very important and done over the weekend. We knew we
needed a schedule fi rst, for teams, TV crews, hospitality, tickets, basically for everyone to get moving. We made a very quick decision
that none of the franchises could have a home ground. We knew which stadiums were willing to host the IPL. Cricket South Africa
had done a great job to clear those grounds. We knew that we couldn’t logistically allocate a franchise to a home stadium so we very
quickly came up with the idea of moving the IPL around South Africa a little bit. It was a good decision to have an opening weekend
with all 8 teams playing in Cape Town on the fi rst weekend so that made an enormous media splash and helped the marketing.

What about branding the stadiums and the ticketing?
The stadium authorities were very well organized. We had a meeting with each of the stadiums’ CEO’s, they came to Johannesburg. We
had a briefi ng and from there on we sent out teams to the venues. They had to start creating the IPL look and feel for the stadiums.
Their were enormous roof signs in Cape Town which we had to paint and cover; there was a bit of negotiation to do to make sure the
stadiums were completely clear of all branding so we could completely identify our sponsors. Cricket South Africa had a relationship
with a ticket agency that was able to very quickly to put on sale the million tickets we had for the IPL matches. We had 20-ish days
when we arrived and I think we were on sale within 10 of those days so in terms of the normal planning for an event of this scale we
constituted everything in a very short period of time.

What are the typical fi res that you need to put out on match day?
You have to do as much before hand as you can and then you just have to be ready for the problems that come up, the teams may get
stuck in traffi c or lights go off, dogs run onto the pitch - you can never tell what’s going to happen!

Did you ever fi gure out whose dog that was on opening day?
No. It was some vender concession vendor so he certainly didn’t want to get caught did he! Everybody fi gured it was the IPL dog cause
they could play more hands? Hahahaha - so that we could kill the game a little bit (laughs)

What were the other logistical diffi culties you faced in South Africa?
Another of the things we picked up when we moved to South Africa was that all the Indian team were essentially over seas and therefore

going to be diffi cult. So we reallocated some of the IPL staff and made them team liaison, we allocated one to each team. They travelled
with the team and essentially became the point person for the team with the centralized IPL resource back in Johannesburg. Together
they made sure the fl ights and hotels were booked and all of the logistical challenges were met. How many hotel rooms did you need
and fl ight tickets did you need there was a number fl oating around that I cant remember? I don’t have the number in my head but lets
try and work it out. There were 200 television crew, there must have been 300 people with the franchises in total, so probably 500 or
600 people traveling around. They were in South Africa for 6 weeks so that’s 42 days, and not all in the same hotel every night. There
were a lot of people are moving around so the bookings were enormous. We had to plan and execute all of this in 10 days and a failure peter griffiths
of missing out even one person would have been disastrous.

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a lot of things that would have been automatic for them in India in terms of just logistics travel moving from one hotels to airports was “