IPL 2018: No cheer leaders for Virat Kohli's RCB

The Indian Premier League (IPL) has always been known for the glamour and glitz that has surrounded the league in the past ten years. The star-studded opening ceremonies, the movie stars supporting the teams from the stands and the cheerleaders rooting up for their respective franchises, adds up to the glamour quotient. However, this time around the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) want to change the way fans perceive the cheerleaders and eliminate the same.

This will be for the very first time that we will see this move from a franchise in the IPL. The move has been initiated since Vijay Mallya is no longer at the helm and the franchise plans to drop the thought of hiring cheer girls for entertaining the fans at the ground. Previously RCB had hired the White Mischief girls from the Washington Redskins cheerleading team in the seasons gone by.

Who will cheer then?

Even in the first game against Kolkata Knight Riders at the Eden Gardens, one could see a change in the cheerleading team for RCB. Instead, they had men and women dressed as Captain Henry Morgan, a Welsh privateer. It is reported that three among them were holding banners with catchphrases in Hindi, English and Kannada, asking the fans to read them aloud to cheer their side.

If RCB’s new head, Amrit Thomas is to be believed, they want a gender neutrality and can’t just have the cheer girls the way they had in the previous editions. “They need to be gender-neutral and represent both men and women,” he said.

A concept borrowed from US

The new head of the RCB is a firm believer of the concept that is why he is against hiring girls for cheering during a match. He said that the concept of cheer girls is borrowed from the US and doesn’t ‘come through properly’ in the Indian set-up. He said that it sometimes ends up as objectifying women which isn’t their intention.

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