Lalit Modi and the genesis of the IPL
It’s now 12 years to the day since it all began. No one present at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on the night of April 18, 2008 had much of an idea what to expect. For nearly 150 years, cricket had been organised on simple territorial lines — country against country, state versus state, or county pitted against county. Twenty20 competitions had been played in other countries for half a decade, but never anything remotely close to the scale of the IPL. This wasn’t just an elephant in the room, it was a great big woolly mammoth.
That it had come to pass so suddenly made it all the more dizzying. Remember that the first time the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) organised a Twenty20 competition was in April 2007, and that too only because the national team had been knocked out in the opening round of the 2007 World Cup.
At the turn of that year, I had done a story for Inside Sport in Australia on the new BCCI dispensation being steered by Lalit Modi. Those we spoke to at the time had no inkling of a blueprint for the IPL. Even Modi, later described as Moses, amongst other things, had been suitably vague in an interview he gave late in 2006. “It’s a format that was inevitable and has been thrust upon us,” he said. “The initial feedback we’re getting is that it’s going to be very popular. We’ll launch it with a domestic series, and we’re developing a structure which would be promoted by a whole new marketing program.”
We ended that story with the lines: “Should you hear of Sachin Tendulkar turning out for the Mumbai Maulers or Ricky Ponting making a cameo appearance for the Bangalore Bisons, you’ll know that those grandiose plans have come to fruition. In the brave, new world of Indian cricket, nothing is impossible, and everything comes with a price-tag attached.”
A shot in the dark, and nothing more. The reality was that until a new-look India side won the inaugural World Twenty20 in South Africa in September 2007, and a country fell hopelessly in love with cricket’s new-format kid on the block, there was no great impetus to roll out the Indian Premier League (IPL). Along with that triumph, the other great push was the launch of the Zee Group’s Indian Cricket League (ICL). Along with setting up his dream project, Modi was also motivated by the desire to shut down a rival.
Even before it began, the money sloshing around in the IPL had raised more than eyebrows. In the week leading up to the opening game, we were in Kanpur, for the final game of South Africa’s three-Test series against India. A South African journalist friend was ghosting a column for one of the players at the time, and we were working in his room one evening when his phone rang.
It was the player’s agent, and he wanted to talk about writing his client’s biography. As the call went on, I could see my friend’s face redden, and by the time he hung up, saying, ‘add another zero, and then we’ll talk’, his tone was brusque. Later, I learned from him that the call had mostly involved the agent gloating over the near-seven-figure IPL salary. Words like ‘yacht’, ‘champagne’ and ‘party’ had apparently been mentioned. It was a sign of what was to come.
The opening game, of course, was mainly Brendon McCullum and little else. The laser show that preceded the cricket had been spectacular, but McCullum’s hitting (and he was no household name then) eclipsed even that. Modi and his PR machine couldn’t have hoped for a better start.
I was curious, and crazy, enough to put together an itinerary that took in as many as 20 of the matches. Unlike in a Test match or ODI, it was hard to unearth narratives or identify patterns while writing about the games themselves. It felt faintly ridiculous to ask someone like Glenn McGrath about a two-over ‘spell’.
But what those six weeks did do was turn conventional cricket wisdom on its head. The general consensus had always been that you could ‘shift down’, but hardly ever up, meaning that the elite Test players could adapt to the shorter forms, while those that excelled in the one-day versions wouldn’t necessarily make great Test players.
That had been proved true in 50-over cricket. Right from the early years, when Viv Richards and Zaheer Abbas dominated the batting, and Joel Garner was the standout bowler, the very best Test stars had little difficulty in adapting. The reverse wasn’t necessarily true. The likes of Michael Bevan and Nathan Bracken fnished their ODI careers with incredible numbers, but struggled to hack it in the Test arena.
At the auction that preceded the first IPL season, several teams, most notably Royal Challengers Bangalore, opted for players with solid Test records, believing that they would be able to adapt as they had to 50-overs cricket. A lot of them didn’t, or couldn’t. Where you could build an innings in one-day cricket, Twenty20 required you to go after the bowlers pretty much from the off. It led to a lot of ugliness, as those we’d associated with sublime strokeplay suddenly began to resemble desperate axemen.
The other takeaway from that first season was the lack of depth in Indian cricket. These days, few of the squads have weak links. There’s been such a steady stream of talent coming through, especially geared towards the shortest format, that 2008 seems a long way in the past. But if you run your eyes over the eight squads for that first season, you’ll see at least two or three players in each who were nowhere close to international standard.
My IPL journey, which took in each venue, was largely based on head-to-head themes. Given what had transpired in Australia with Monkeygate just months earlier, there was no questions of missing matches that involved Harbhajan Singh coming up against Andrew Symonds (Mumbai Indians v Deccan Chargers) or Matthew Hayden (Chennai Super Kings), who had called him an ‘obnoxious little weed’.
This time, there was no such drama. Instead, Hayden trained his ire on Sreesanth (Kings XI Punjab), calling him ‘a singularly ordinary bowler’, and Harbhajan followed suit, slapping his international teammate. Many of these contests allowed for strange twists. Sourav Ganguly versus Rahul Dravid on Rabindra Jayanti in Kolkata, for example, finished only by 1am after persistent rain had reduced it to 16 overs a side. Ganguly made just 20, and Dravid only 5, but Ganguly the bowler won it with a spell of 1–7 from three overs.
Watching Kolkata was a surreal experience, and the first sign that the IPL audience was very different from previous cricket gatherings. The vast majority of replica shirts had Shah Rukh Khan’s name on the back, rather than Ganguly’s. Imagine Manchester United fans walking around in Glazer shirts or Arsenal fans celebrating Stan Kroenke. I thought not.
I’m still full of admiration for the players who pulled through to the end of that season. The heat, by the time we got to May, was just hideous. By the last fortnight, I’d get to my hotel, stay indoors till 6pm, and then head to the stadium. Pre-match press conferences had become facsimiles of each other, and training sessions offered few insights. Several of the players, exhausted by the schedule and the parties, seemed to be going through the motions too.
That was, of course, the last time we saw Pakistani international players in the IPL. As much as Shane Warne’s captaincy, Shane Watson’s all-round brilliance, and the opening partnership of Graeme Smith and Swapnil Asnodkar, it’s doubtful that Rajasthan Royals — rank outsiders before the competition began — would have won the title without the deceptive left-arm pace of Sohail Tanvir.
Neither he nor the Royals would scale such heights again. But the IPL didn’t look back. Even when the clash with the general election in 2009 forced it to switch to South Africa, Modi and his team managed to pull it off. By then, even the English snootiness about the competition had begun to disappear, with Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen both getting bumper contracts in February 2009.
I covered 60 matches in all across the first three seasons, which culminated in Modi getting his marching orders right after the third final at the DY Patil Stadium on the outskirts of Mumbai. It was never quite the same after that. The standards on the field improved, as more and more Indian players came to grips with what was required. But the buzz that Modi had created and maintained for three years wasn’t quite the same. Those that succeeded him appreciated the money the IPL brought to the coffers, but were never as evangelical about the tournament as he had been.
Even 15 years ago, the idea of players ending international careers to focus on franchise cricket was quite laughable. The IPL changed that, giving players the kind of paydays previously associated only with American team sports and European football. And while the current pandemic may well mean season 13 never happens, the roots of the tree that Modi planted and watered now go so deep that the IPL is here to stay.
Originally published at http://dileeppremachandran.wordpress.com on April 18, 2020.