Not entirely, but the Twenty20 Cup and the KFC Big Bash are proper domestic tournaments for the domestic teams. They don't need to spend millions of dollars to bring in the worlds best talent, just to make it exciting.
Going back to my previous point, it's the same thing here. All the IPL did is they have created 8 new teams. Like Australia, the BCCI finally recognized that a league with dozens of teams (our domestic structure had something like 27 teams at last count) isn't really feasible for any sort of quality competition.
Secondly, the IPL is not marketed towards a specific domestic audience, unlike the Twenty20 Cup and KFC Big Bash, so in that respect it can't necessarily compare with those tournaments. It's a new (well, the ICL first came up with it) idea based on a franchise-system. Almost no one in India watches the English Twenty20 or KFC Big Bash although most of the games are broadcast on Star Cricket. That's because no one cares about the domestic competitions of other countries. Unlike that, the IPL is marketing itself to the whole world, apart from India, which is why they have put in the money to attract the best players in the world.
It doesn't need hundreds of sponsors, or cheerleaders. The cricket talks for itself and is good enough without all the gimmicks. The County Championship is also FAR better than the IPL will ever be.
Don't know why you're comparing a first class competition to the IPL. Also, I don't know why you're taking account of gimmicks when comparing the quality of cricket. Even without the gimmicks, the quality of cricket in the IPL is better than the English Twenty20 and KFC Big Bash because it involves most of the best players in the game, unlike those tournaments which is dominated in majority by county players who have no hope of playing in national colors.
And for the sake of staying on topic, I think what Zorax meant with less intensity is that you're definitely going to put in less intensity when playing for something like the county championship when compared to an international game. Although he provided exaggerated numbers, you wouldn't expect Flintoff to deliver Test-match-intensity on a day-to-day basis in the domestic first class matches. Also, most players would put in a lot of effort in the IPL, although it's just Twenty20, because they would feel guilty of the amount they were being paid!
sohum added 4 Minutes and 26 Seconds later...
The EPL wasn't a new league with new teams though. It was a repackaged English First Division, which has been in existance for hundreds of years.
The point is that when a league, any league, hell anything for that matter, starts, everything is going to be new. When you go back those hundreds of years to the English First Division, the league was created with teams that didn't exist before, hence new teams.
What the IPL lacks is the historic development of those teams. But if its around in a couple of decades, it'll have that, too.
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