The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  The cricket team was also starting to look like a decent business in its own right. After three IPL seasons, GMR claimed to be around $15 million out of pocket on its investment, including the annual repayments of its franchise fee. That was less than half the losses of some other team-owners.

  ‘The young boys of Delhi carry the maximum money in their pocket – their ability to spend money, I tell you, it’s amazing,’ said Vanchi, unburdening himself after a long day buying cricketers. ‘I have a bigger demand for a 25,000 ticket than a fucking 5,000 rupee ticket. So I raise the price and then they want to know, “Is there anything more expensive than that?” That’s the Delhi market. My most expensive tickets get sold three months in advance.’

  This was the upside of operating in India’s flash, prosperous capital. But there was a downside, which Vanchi, a native of slower-moving, civilised Chennai, was finding hard to get used to. ‘Delhi people will be nice to you one day, and the next they will kick you in the back,’ he said bitterly. ‘Delhi has no heart. Delhi has no head. Delhi only has physique. You know, people think that as you go south, India gets narrower, but it’s totally the opposite in a way. As you move south, India is far more entrepreneurial, far more broadminded. Today I can’t buy the loyalty of people in Delhi, I just cannot. What they want to know is, “What is there for me?”’

  He was tired and sounded overwrought. ‘I’ve never loved Delhi,’ said the boss of the Delhi Daredevils. ‘The people in Delhi are never warm. They have a tendency to display their wealth and they’re cut-throats. They’re like, “money, money, money”. Everything is money.’

  ‘And how are you finding building a fan-base?’ I asked.

  ‘Building a fan-base in Delhi is very difficult because there is no factor like loyalty in Delhi,’ he said glumly. ‘There are only interests.’

  After Irfan finished his spell, I walked slowly around the Roshanara boundary, pacing myself against the heat, to where the Daredevils’ CEO Amrit Mathur, was sitting. At around 35°C, it was very hot, but in the invigorating way of early summer. It was still bearable by Delhi standards. The sky retained a hint of blue. It was not yet washed-out summertime grey.

  I paused to watch Irfan jog to the boundary for some water. He looked superbly fit, with muscles bulging through his sopping blue shirt. Tossing back the empty plastic bottle to a servant, he said ‘dhanyavad’, a Hindi word for ‘thank you’ that Delhi wallahs use sparingly. Then he jogged bravely back out to the wicket.

  Amrit was sitting under an umbrella, watching the play. He waved cheerily as I approached and urged me to get into the shade. A dapper middle-aged man, wearing a pair of sporty blue sunglasses, Amrit was considered one of the good guys in Indian cricket. A former senior civil servant in the India railways, he had run its cricket operations for over a decade, while also being known as an unusually competent officer of the BCCI. That was why Modi had hired him, back in 1995, to draft a blueprint for his putative Indian Cricket League.

  Amrit had also attended the momentous 2003 tour of Pakistan, as the Indian team’s media manager. When I had called him up and asked if I could follow him and the Daredevils through the forthcoming season, he had said it would be his pleasure.

  There were two important issues I wanted to resolve during the season. I wanted to decide, on the basis of a careful look at the IPL, whether it was actually any good. Its standards of play had clearly improved, especially the batting, which – as in T20 generally – was becoming ever more inventive. The IPL’s standard of fielding, a big weakness in the opening seasons, had also got better, which perhaps suggested the tournament had raised the basic skills in Indian cricket. But did this make the IPL a proper sporting contest?

  Until around about the inaugural T20 World Cup, in 2007, few international players had taken the shortest format very seriously. ‘Hit and giggle’ is what some called it. But now, chiefly because of the IPL, it was the game’s most lucrative format. A top Australian player such as Shane Watson, who was in demand for all formats, should soon expect to have to play T20 for four months each year: including two months in the IPL, six weeks in Australia’s Big Bash League, two weeks in the Champions League, plus a couple of weeks of international T20 games.

  This deluge of T20 had not come at much cost to Test or one-day cricket yet. To maximise profits, the game’s administrators had simply squeezed T20 games into an already packed cricket calendar. But if T20 expanded further, both Test and one-day schedules would have to be cut back. And this looked almost inevitable. The BCCI had already demonstrated its willingness to expand the IPL in search of ever-greater profits.

  Thus the addition of the new Pune and Kochi teams this IPL season, which meant there would be 72 games, up from 60. And the board was also coming under increasing pressure from the franchise-owners to increase the duration of the tournament. That was not so much because they wanted to play more cricket. It was because they wanted more access to their star players, to help them sell sponsorship and advertising packages. Hence the second issue I wanted to resolve. Whatever the IPL was worth, I wanted to know whether, despite its recent upheavals and the faddishness of the Indian cricket fan, the tournament was here to stay. There was probably no bigger question in cricket.

  Amrit also had doubts about the league, though not about whether it was any good. No one making his bread from the IPL could afford such thoughts. He was concerned about the viability of the IPL’s business model, especially given most of the teams’ failures to build reliable fan-bases. The Daredevils, despite having done fairly well on the field in previous seasons, had not recruited many loyal fans, as Vanchi had intimated. Cricket’s roots are not deep in Delhi, nor is there much sense of civic pride in the city. In 2007 the Daredevils had launched a fan club with the aim of recruiting 100,000 members within a year. But after three years it had only 25,000 members, and had been closed down.

  This mattered because, as the franchises’ share of television and other central revenues decreased, the teams would be increasingly reliant on merchandising and local advertising to make money. Lacking a loyal support-base would make this much harder. In the absence of many committed fans, the Daredevils were meanwhile relying on their main celebrity cricketer, Virender Sehwag, to draw a crowd. A local Delhi wallah, he had played for the team since the league’s inception, and Amrit said it was impossible to stress how valuable this had been: ‘People come to the ground because Sehwag is playing, not to support the team.’

  GMR had therefore made sure to retain him for this season, despite there having been a compulsory clear-out of the IPL squads at the end of the previous one. This was intended to give the two new franchises an equal opportunity to hire good players. To retain a player, the franchises had had to pay him a generous increment; the Daredevils were paying Sehwag around $2.2 million a season. Mumbai Indians had similarly retained Tendulkar, on a rumoured salary of $4 million. Dhoni had been kept on at Chennai Super Kings, for around $3 million. Most other players had been thrown back into the player auction in Bangalore, much to the annoyance of the eight original franchises. ‘Let’s just say it doesn’t help to build team loyalty when you lose your team,’ Amrit said delicately.

  He hoped he had got a good new squad. It was hard to be sure. T20 was still comparatively new and it was not yet clear what a winning formula looked like. In India, spinners and really fast bowlers (like Morkel) had been most effective. Yet there remained a suspicion that T20 was so unpredictable that picking a successful team was something of a lottery. Nonetheless, there were reasons to fear for new Daredevils. The franchise had hired no really top batsman to support Sehwag and the hard-hitting Australian David Warner, who it had also retained. It also had no top-class spinner and looked to have paid too much for some second-grade Indians, Irfan included. Amrit acknowledged that he had been expensive. ‘But we wanted a top Indian all-rounder, which left us little choice,’ he said. ‘There’s a major shortage of them.’

  As one of India’s most photogenic stars
, Irfan brought more to the squad than cricket skills. This was good news for the team’s sponsors. ‘It’s not that the sponsor tells us who to go out and buy,’ said Amrit. ‘But, of course, we understand who has got commercial appeal ...’ Sehwag and Irfan featured on almost all the Daredevils’ billboards that were then going up around Delhi. There was no sign of Morkel, who had been hired to take wickets not to sell shirts.

  While we chatted, the practice was ending. The new-look Daredevils congregated on the wicket to shake hands and exchange high-fives. As in every franchise, the international players, Indian and foreign, had only met up with the squad in the past week, which made forging a team spirit hard. Some of the franchises were therefore trying to accelerate the bonding process. The Rajasthan Royals, under the direction of their in-house psychologist Jeremy Snape, were playing at being Rajput warriors, with real elephants for props. Nita Ambani, wife of the Mumbai Indians’ proprietor, had a habit of delivering windy pep talks to her team, focusing on her family’s business success. The Indian press wrote a lot about Nita’s talismanic effect on her cricketers, and she was said to believe what it wrote.

  But there was little evidence of team spirit in the IPL. Teams that went on losing streaks often collapsed, as Punjab had done the previous year, and KKR always did. The Royals, who had played consistently above the sum of their talents, were the exception: probably more because of their captain, Shane Warne, than the elephants.

  I watched the new Daredevils troop in for lunch. They left the wicket in a tight huddle, but by the time they reached the boundary line they had hived off into three distinct groups: first came the Indian team players, Sehwag, Irfan and Ajit Agarkar; then the foreigners, Morkel, Hopes, Travis Birt and Aaron Finch; then a gaggle of lesser Indian players, traipsing diffidently in behind them.

  Four days later I turned up at the Feroz Shah Kotla to watch the Daredevils’ curtain-raiser against Mumbai Indians. It was an evening game, and the streets outside the stadium were hot, dark and snarled up with hooting traffic. The dark outline of the Kotla loomed above, shining a beacon of silver neon light into a starless sky.

  Having not yet received my press pass, I had begged a ticket for the game from a contact at IMG. It gave me access to a VIP box on the third tier of the stadium, which had been reserved for the Delhi District Cricket Association. Its glass wall provided a fine view of the stadium, which was decked in the Daredevils’ blue and red colours, and heaving with 30,000 tamasha-seekers.

  A thunder of dance music and cheering vibrated through the glass as Tendulkar led the Mumbai Indians on to the field. GMR’s marketers had attempted to bill the Indians as the Daredevils’ great foe – because if the Daredevils were to become a proper sports club they would need a grudge rival, and the Mumbai team were an obvious candidate. But for most spectators the game was primarily an opportunity to see Sachin.

  The VIP box was seriously overcrowded with friends and relatives of the DDCA. It was going to make the game hard to watch. A crowd of overweight children lined the window, almost blocking out the view. No one else seemed to mind much, however. Perhaps they were already thinking of supper, as a delicious scent of garlic and masalas wafted around the room. Next to me sat a high court judge’s bodyguard, with a pistol sticking out of his waistband. ‘Sachin-bhai!’ he murmured, as the Mumbai Indians captain directed his fielders. He sounded unsure, as I was, whether we were inside the stadium or not.

  Craning to see over the children’s heads, I watched the game begin. Two World Cup winners were straight into the action: Harbhajan Singh was bowling to Sehwag, who hit his fourth ball for a ‘DLF maximum’. The crowd roared, giant speakers thundered out a snatch of the Daredevils’ anthem ‘Khelo front foot pe!’ (‘Play on the front foot!’) The word ‘Monstrous!’ flashed up on the Kotla’s giant television screen. Then the Delhi crowd resumed chanting Sachin’s name.

  Their hero responded by running out Sehwag with a smart throw from fine leg, where a giant red and white advertisement for Karbonn mobile phones had been painted on to the pitch. The crowd roared, either in exultation or in disappointment. And it continued roaring as Mumbai’s best bowler, the Sri Lankan slinger Lasith Malinga, cut through the Daredevils. He took five wickets in three overs, including four clean-bowled with his trademark yorkers. The Daredevils were all out for 95, a wretched score. Yet it was impossible to know whether the churning, hollering crowd was happy or sad.

  This was not merely a case of ‘bad strokes cheered just as lustily as good strokes,’ as Neville Cardus wrote sniffily of the Lancashire leagues. From the muffled detachment of the VIP freeloaders’ box, the crowd seemed to be cheering anything that moved. It screamed when runs were scored, when wickets fell or the Daredevils’ cheerleaders – Eastern Europeans in hot pants – waggled their pompoms. It yelled when Tendulkar’s face flashed up on a giant TV screen. It cheered the Mumbai Indians’ owners, Mukesh and Nita Ambani, when they flashed up, looking rather shy. They were perched on an enormous pitch-side sofa and obviously trying hard not to look at the cameras. Arun Jaitley, the Delhi cricket association’s BJP boss and his Congressman sidekick, Rajeev Shukla, had managed to squeeze themselves on to the sofa alongside them. They probably thought the crowd was cheering them.

  The Mumbai Indians knocked off the Daredevils’ runs for the loss of only two wickets: the result of the game was never in doubt. Tendulkar, batting through the innings, made 46 not out, including a six that raised the biggest cheer of the night. Irfan, in his first game for a year, had a miserable evening. He was run out for a duck and bowled only 2.5 overs, including the last ball of the match, which Tendulkar hit for four. It really was a rotten game.

  I had quite enjoyed it, though. It was wonderful to see Malinga, with his eccentric brilliance. And the sight of the heaving Kotla was thrilling. But as a contest the game was a non-event, as T20 games often are. The outcome was decided inside the first seven overs, when the Daredevils lost four wickets. There is usually no coming back from such a start in T20, so everything that followed was predictable. This would be a dismal feature of the season: too few of the nail-biting finishes on which the format depends for most of its drama.

  The problem with T20 is not, as some purists gripe, that it is not cricket. It is absolutely cricket. It is played on the same pitch, with the same implements, and features many of the same batting strokes, bowling deliveries and fielding positions as any other form of the game. The best cricketers, like Tendulkar or Sehwag, usually excel at it. As the closest thing to street-cricket – the hit-it-or-get-out games that millions of Indian children play – T20, you might even argue, is somehow real cricket. But this does not make it very good.

  T20 cricketers are certainly skilful. ‘Some of the things the younger batsmen are trying out, it just amazes me,’ Adam Gilchrist, captain of Kings XI Punjab, told me. But the thrill of big-hitting palls in the absence of an interesting contest. ‘T20 is like a porn movie,’ W.V. Raman, a former India batsman, put it to me, ‘I mean, it’s OK for a bit, but how long can you watch the bonking?’

  A bigger problem, even in a tight run-chase, is the lack of much serious competition between bat and ball, which is the fundamental drama of cricket. It is almost always primarily a batsman’s game, and in India especially, but T20 grossly exaggerates that bias. The shortness of the game, the miserly allotment of only four overs per bowler, small boundaries and flat pitches: the conditions in which T20 is played are designed to maximise hitting. T20 bowlers are cannon fodder – even Malinga is. For all his wicket-taking prowess in the IPL, the Sri Lankan still concedes seven runs per T20 over.

  Thus slapped about, T20 bowlers cannot build pressure, which kills their craft. In T20 a bowler has no time to soften a batsman up with bouncers or a carefully chosen arrangement of deliveries. Against a snorting, risk-oblivious T20 batsman, most of these balls could get hit for six. In T20 any hittable ball is therefore a bad ball, including the traditional length-and-line deliveries that are the basis of bowling skills.


  Another big problem with T20, wherever it is played, is how little it ever really matters. High-risk batting is, in a way, not risky at all, because it comes with an appreciation that, at any moment, the batsman is liable to get out. So he cannot really be blamed when he does. Compared to other cricket formats, it seems to me, batsmen in T20 tend not to look very upset as they trudge back to the pavilion. Their only serious crime would be not to attack: so long as a batsman is out swiping, he has more or less done his job. This makes T20, for all its speed and noise, fatefully bathetic. Ashis Nandy, India’s obtuse cricket theorist, had it right: compared to traditional forms of cricket, T20 is a debasement.

  I asked Gilchrist how it compared to Test cricket. A thoughtful man, he paused to reflect on the question, imparting a sense that he wanted to get this one absolutely right. ‘There’s just nothing so exhilarating, so exciting, so physically and mentally challenging as Test match cricket,’ he said, sitting in his cherry-and-silver Kings XI kit, on the other side of a restaurant table.

  ‘Look ...’ he said, and paused again, slightly awkwardly. ‘I don’t want to get too carried away here ...’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well look, Test match cricket is a five-day game. Think about that, five days of sport! To be able to look across at your team-mate at the end of that, to know you’ve planned for it, fought it out, gone through so much together, knife-edge twists and turns in the game, being physically exhausted on day three, so mentally exhausted on day four that you struggle to get up in the morning, and then hopefully, you know, you come out on top. It’s just very, very hard to describe how great that is.’

  ‘And how’s T20?’

  ‘Ah, it’s a good game,’ Gilchrist said.