Celebrity Cricket League (CCL), an initiative combining the two most popular forms of entertainment - cinema and cricket - is set to bring together Bollywood and the southern film industry to play a game of cricket in January.

"This is the first year. We are just bringing it together. Once it takes off and this model works, we'll make it more structured. Once we get the support, we'll make it a bigger model. We'll do proper practice and we are taking this very seriously," Bollywood star Sohail Khan told reporters here.

The match, which will take place in the last week of January, 2011, will have many known names from the southern film industry. Sohail Khan, who has named the team Mumbai Heroes, is its owner.

Suniel Shetty is the captain of the team and Salman Khan, the icon player.

The Mumbai Heroes team includes Riteish Deshmukh, Aftab Shivdasani, Kunal Khemu, Ashish Choudhary, Shabbir Ahluwalia, Makrand Deshpande, Kabir Sadanand, Apoorva Lakhia, Sonu Sood, Harman Baweja, Angad Bedi, Irrfan Khan, and Zayed Khan.

Cinema is a religion in this country and so is cricket. These two Cs are coming together now, in the form of Celebrity Cricket League (CCL), one of the biggest entertainment events the New Year 2011 is going to witness.

The organizers of the CCL said that four cricket teams from the country’s’ four biggest film industries would vie for top honors.

“Players from Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi industries will play the matches and their performance on the pitch would decide who is going to be the winner,” according to the organizers.

They said prominent actors from all the industries have agreed to support the cricket league. In all probability, Sarath Kumar, ‘Jayam’ Ravi, STR, Jeeva, Santhanu, Ramesh, Ramana, Arun Vijay, Vikranth and Abbas would be the Kollywood team. During the CCL six league matches will be conducted and one final, which will take off in January 2011

 The teams are titled as

Bollywood (Mumbai Heroes)

Tollywood (Telugu Tigers)

Sandalwood (Bangalore Stars)

Kollywood (Tamil Superstars)