Indiantelevision.com Team

(13 March 2008 6:30 pm)

MUMBAI: With India scheduled to play three Test matches against South Africa at home in The Future Cup from 26 March, telecast rights owner Neo Sports has announced that it will kick off the campaign ‘India’s Race to No. 1 - Test Cricket’.

Neo Sports VP marketing and communication Ranjith Rajasekharan says that the programming initiatives that the channel does will be under this umbrella campaign.

The channel has roped in Mohinder Amarnath and Peter Kirsten as commentators. Extra Cover will have several features including cricket analysis, news segments as well as lighter behind the scenes stories. Radhakrishnan Sreenivasan and Neha Sareen will host the studio segments.

Archana Vijaya will host the out of the studio segment called Tour Diary. She will follow the team at different venues across the country, covering the atmosphere at the stadiums as well as interacting with fans and cricketers. The show will air an hour before the start of each match day and will continue when there are breaks.

Launching Neo's campaign, Test star VVS Laxman said, “This is an exciting phase of Test cricket where we now stand at the threshold of something special. However I would like to personally take it one match at a time and am fully focused on the upcoming Future Cup to help maintain our upward climb in the test rankings.

"While the players are excited about the IPL as well, the fact is that playing for the country provides us with the ultimate motivation. We have changed our reputation of being poor travelers abroad. We won the Test series playing in England and the West Indies. We also played well in Australia, so much so that after the Sydney test they played very defensively especially in Adelaide. This gave the players a lot of confidence which we will carry into this series.”

India plays Test series against South Africa, Australia and England at home this year. It also travels to Sri Lanka. With so much of cricket, India has the chance to become the number one team in Test cricket. If that happens, sports broadcasters will have a lot to cheer after paying big for acquiring live telecast rights to these matches.