Mumbai: Sahara India Parivar, which had bought Indian cricket team's multi-crore sponsorship rights, announced here on Saturday its withdrawal from sponsoring the team after International Cricket Council (ICC) refused to allow use of saffron and green (national colours) strokes on players clothing in the ongoing Champions Trophy at Colombo. In a statement, Subrata Roy Sahara, chairman of Sahara India Pariwar, said, "This unreasonable, irrational and offensive condition, where the saffron and green strokes, an integral part of Sahara's logo, has been blacked out on players' shirts, is completely against national pride and Sahara's philosophy and values.
"Hence we are forced to withdraw from the sponsorship of the Indian cricket team," he said. "The game of cricket has always touched an emotional chord and generated a sense of unbridled passion amongst our countrymen," the statement said. It was through a strong commitment to the spirit of "Bhartiyata", which overrode marketing motives, that we decided to take up the sponsoring of the Indian cricket team, it said. "Sahara will take all steps necessary to protect national pride and enforce its rights and will also initiate appropriate legal proceedings against all concerned," the statement added. "Sahara India Parivar has also decided as an emotional support to cricketers, who bring the nation pride, to give them their share of revenue for the ICC Champions Trophy, which will be paid directly to the cricketers," the statement said. The Indian team, which took the field against Zimbabwe in the first match of the tournament, did not sport any logo on their clothings, as directed by the BCCI. Official spokesman for Sahara Sanjay Lal said after a marathon four-hour meeting here, the company decided it was no longer worthwhile to continue with their sponsorship. "We received a message from ICC yesterday that the wings were not acceptable to them. These are not wings but merely strokes of the national colours and no way are we going to remove them," he said. "Never before the wings were made an issue and suddenly now they are objecting to it. It is a completely unfair demand," he said. Sahara hammered a multi-crore sponsorship deal for a period of three years with the BCCI in June last year.
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India to play against Zimbabwe without logo: BCCI
Tags: icc 2002, icc champions trophy, india, new zealand, premadasa, sri lanka, pakistan, australia, england, bangladesh, , zimbabwe, kenya, netherlands, west indies, south africa, semi final, finals, scorecards, statistics, ground.
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