Viacom18, the broadcasters of the inaugural Women’s Premier League (WPL), announced on Friday that Anjum Chopra, Veda Krishnamurthy, Zaheer Khan and Aakash Chopra will be among the prominent names in their coverage of the tournament taking place from March 4-26.
Other members of the expert panel for the WPL include Punam Raut, Reema Malhotra, Natalie Germanos, Kate Cross, Mel Jones, Venkatesh Prasad, Parthiv Patel, Saba Karim, Pragyan Ojha, and Abhinav Mukund.
The WPL season-opener on March 4 will see Gujarat Giants taking on Mumbai Indians at the D.Y. Patil Stadium. The tournament will be presented in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu on JioCinema for no cost.
On TV, fans can catch the action live in English and Telugu on Sports18-1 SD & HD, in Hindi on Sports18 Khel, in Kannada on Colors Kannada Cinema, and in Tamil on Colors Tamil.
“We are thrilled to present the first season of the Women’s Premier League across JioCinema and multiple channels of our network. Our efforts are focused on offering viewers an immersive experience which is accessible, affordable, and in multiple languages to scale up the league’s impact and reach.”
“Through our wide-spread coverage, including 4K presentation in English and Hindi, we aim to bring the excitement and competitiveness of the league to millions of sports fans across the country in their favourite language for free on JioCinema. We look forward to an exciting season of top-class cricket and celebrating the incredible cricketers on the field,” said Viacom18 Sports Head of Content Siddharth Sharma, in an official statement.
In the WPL, there are five teams — Mumbai Indians, Delhi Capitals, Royal Challengers Bangalore, UP Warriorz and Gujarat Giants. 22 matches will be in all, including the final on March 26 at the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai.
All five teams will play each other twice in the round-robin stage. The tournament has four double-header days. Afternoon games will begin at 3:30 pm, while the evening games will start at 7:30 pm.
The team that finishes first on the table will go straight into the final. Teams finishing second and third will play the eliminator; the winner from which will go into the final to meet the top-ranked team.
The full WPL expert panel:
English: Kate Cross, Natalie Germanos, Mel Jones
Hindi: Anjum Chopra, Reema Malhotra, Samantha Lobatto, Zaheer Khan, Aakash Chopra, Parthiv Patel, Anant Tyagi and Saba Karim, Punam Raut, Pragyan Ojha
Tamil: Niranjana Nagarajan, Aarti Sankaran, Abhinav Mukund, Anirudha Srikkanth, Vidyut Sivaramkrishnan, Sudhir Srinivasan, Bagawati Prasad, R Sridhar
Kannada: Veda Krishnamurthy, Karuna Jain, Venkatesh Prasad, Sujay Shastry, Raghavendra Raj, Sumanth
Telugu: Sunitha Anand, Sravanthi Naidu, Sandeep Bavanaka, Vijay Goud, Venkatpathy Raju, Hanuma Vihari, Akshath Reddy.