Lalit Modi stated that Srinivasan doubted that the league would succeed.
Lalit Modi, the brainchild behind the Indian Premier League, has accused former BCCI President and CSK owner N Srinivasan of rigging the IPL auction and also of umpire fixing.
This came when Modi appeared on a podcast and during the conversation revealed that Srinivasan had asked him to exclude Sri Lanka’s Thisara Perera from CSK's roster so that English all-rounder Andrew Flintoff could be picked.
Flintoff was then picked by CSK in the IPL auction after Modi revealed that he had asked other franchise not to bid for him. The flamboyant all-rounder was bought by the Chennai team for a then-record fee of INR 7.5 crore in the 2009 IPL player auction.
However, Flintoff, who was dealing with injury issues had a poor outing for CSK, scoring 62 runs in three matches at an average of 31 with a strike rate below 120 and took only two wickets before being ruled out of the tournament.
"Pick out everything—auction rigging. I gave Flintoff to Srinivasan. No doubts about it; every team knew about it. Srinivasan wasn’t going to let the IPL happen. He was a thorn in our Board. Yes, we told everybody not to pick ‘Flintoff.’ Yes, that I did—because Srinivasan said he wanted it," Lalit Modi said on Raj Shamani podcast.
Modi further said that Srinivasan first doubted the IPL's success and soon turned against the former, accusing him of umpire rigging. The IPL founder described how Srinivasan would assign a Chennai-based umpire to a CSK match, which may be considered indirect fixing.
"When you're trying to organize an event like the IPL, and I'm doing it single-handedly, you need to remove every thorn. What is bigger for the game? Every player is there only for three months, maybe three years. He didn’t like the IPL and he didn’t think it would work, but then it started to work.
When everybody started going back-to-back, he was also a member of the board. He was a big adversary of mine. I went up against him, and he did many things. Umpire fixing—he accused me of it, and I accused him right back. He would change the umpire,” Modi said.
"At first, I didn’t think much about it. But when I realized he was putting a Chennai umpire on a Chennai game, it became an issue for me. That’s called indirect fixing. When I started exposing those things, he went totally against me,” Modi added.
Interestingly, CSK went on to win as many as five IPL titles, a joint record they share with Mumbai Indians.