The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  I was often surprised, reading over the notes I took during half a dozen Delhi Daredevils games, by how exciting I found them at the time. I hadn’t quite remembered that, because the thrill of T20 is in the moment. And as soon as it becomes clear who will win – sometimes very early on in the game – the moment is past.

  Filing out of the Kotla, after the Daredevils had received their first hiding of the season, the crowd seemed happy and calm. No one seemed angry, rowdy or, by hard-living Delhi standards, terribly drunk. But nor was anyone within earshot discussing the game. It was already gone and forgotten.

  The Daredevils’ second match, in Jaipur against the Rajasthan Royals, went almost as badly as the first had. Sehwag got out early, and the rest of the batting collapsed. The Daredevils’ final score, 151, looked just about competitive; but the Royals passed it with ease. Rahul Dravid, who had been snapped up cheaply by the Royals after being ditched by Bangalore, top-scored with 38, including an on-driven six off Irfan of unforgettable elegance. Irfan got smashed, going for 32 runs in three overs.

  I showed up the next day at Jaipur’s Sawai Mansingh Stadium, home of the Royals. It was being prepared for their next game, against Kolkata Knight Riders, and was in a state of chaos. The Royals’ British CEO, Sean Morris, a former Hampshire cricketer, was looking hot and angry, battling workmen, policemen and officers of the Rajasthan Cricket Association. The main row concerned a temporary VIP stand he was having built for the Royals owners, including the film star Shilpa Shetty. Naturally, the officials also wanted bum-space on it. ‘Just wait till tomorrow,’ Morris growled as he strode past. ‘It’s going to be the biggest bloody fight you’ve ever seen.’

  I walked out on to the lush green outfield, enjoying the feel of its spiky turf underfoot. The match wicket, into which the stumps had already been sunk, had a glistening brown patina of polished mud. A policeman was guarding it, slouched behind the stumps like a drowsy umpire.

  In the covers, some workmen were touching up an advertisement for Karbonn mobile phones, slapping red paint on to the grass. Their bare legs were stained bright red from the knee down: from a distance they appeared to be morphing out of the ad. I wandered over to talk to them, which proved difficult. They were Bengali sign-painters, it turned out, who migrated to Jaipur for the duration of each IPL season. They spoke no English, little Hindi and, over 1,000 miles from home in humid Kolkata, were almost as foreign to Rajasthan as I was. They complained about its dry desert heat; yet seemed happy enough. They were earning 500 rupees a day for painting the cricket pitch, more than double what they earned in Kolkata.

  I had come to the stadium looking for another migrant, the Royals’ captain Shane Warne. Tendulkar notwithstanding, he was the most influential cricketer in the IPL. After taking 1,000 wickets for Australia, Warne was now aged 41 and otherwise retired, living the life of a globetrotting celebrity. A fixture on British and Australian chat shows, he also did a bit of cricket commentary, played competitive poker and had a reputation for chasing glamorous women – all successfully. Anything competitive Warne put his mind too, he usually came off best.

  Even now, with a stiff, middle-aged shoulder and hardly any practice, he was one of the best bowlers in the tournament. Though he had lost some of his variations and guile, he retained his near-perfect control and his greatest attacking weapon, his tremendously forceful character. Against the best international batsmen, let alone callow Indians half his age, Warne was still an intimidating presence on a cricket field. He had been too good for the Daredevils. Spot-on from his first delivery, Warne had taken two for 17 and the man of the match award. There was no more intriguing cricketer or advocate for the IPL.

  We arranged to meet that evening at the team hotel, the Rambagh Palace, another former Modi haunt. As I sat waiting for him on a torch-lit veranda, listening to a Rajasthani band and the genteel chatter of European holidaymakers, I worried that I might not recognise Warne. His face had recently undergone some considerable change. Once rather pudgy, his features were now sealed in a permanent wrinkle-free spasm. He claimed not to have had Botox treatment, but no one quite believed him. Under floodlights, Warne’s new face took on an unearthly sheen, the light sliding off his cheeks and making his California-perfect white teeth sparkle. It was the face of a middle-aged film star, not a cricketer, and the makeover was not appreciated by all of Warne’s fans. ‘The outrageous falsity of his new eyeball area raises the question of what it means to be handsome,’ pondered the Australian writer Clive James. ‘Surely, at any age, it must mean to look like a human being.’

  But Warne turned up punctually for our interview, as no self-respecting film star would. He was wearing a blue tracksuit and carried a BlackBerry in one hand and a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes in the other. He introduced himself politely, almost as if people had been having trouble recognising him. But he was unmistakeably Warne, the weirdness of his new face much less acute on the softly lit veranda.

  He was friendly but slightly awkward at first, a practised but not actorly celebrity. He knew I wanted his considered opinions, not just some anecdotes about his career, and maybe he was uneasy about that. Warne was a very serious man. But off the pitch, he sometimes tried hard to dispel that impression. The banter he dished out on Twitter to his celebrity pals and thousands of slavish followers was beyond inane. Yet when Warne got talking about cricket, with his enormous forcefulness and certainty, his thoughts and recollections flowed.

  I congratulated him on his bowling against the Daredevils and asked how much practice he’d been putting in. ‘Not too much,’ he said. In fact, not really any, it turned out. Warne hadn’t played a game since the previous IPL season, and his pre-season practice had consisted of bowling at a wall in Los Angeles, where he had gone to visit his girlfriend, the British model Elizabeth Hurley. ‘I had a couple of sessions by myself, up a laneway, just bowling up against a wall, catching the ball, that sort of thing,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. He took a long drag, exhaled and then gave a rueful smile. ‘I lost a ball in someone’s garden. It spun a bit, hit a bin and went over a gate. I thought I’d better not climb in and get it.’ So that was how the IPL’s greatest bowler trained for the tournament.

  I put it to Warne that T20 wasn’t up to much, but he was not having any of that. ‘Not at all,’ he said forcefully. ‘I think it’s a good game. I think it shows off real skill, it shows off fielding talent, and I think only good players will do well at it. There are a few exceptions. But most of those who do well in T20 are good cricketers.’

  I said that made it sound like it wasn’t cricket. But Warne wasn’t having that, either.

  ‘Captaining Twenty20 is probably the most satisfying out of any form of the game. That’s because you’ve got no time. You’re always on the clock and you can’t say, “Hang on a minute, just let me figure this out.” You’ve always got to be a couple of overs ahead of the game. Every ball’s alive.’ Gilchrist, I noted, had said the same.

  Warne saw plenty of innovation in T20 too. ‘Each year there’s something new going on. In the last couple of years it’s been slow balls and bouncers. Now we’re going to see set plays coming into it more, like firing in the last ball of the over as a wide yorker or a bouncer maybe, to give the batsman one. That’s going to frustrate the batsman who’s not getting strike.’

  ‘People have a go at Twenty20 not because it’s not good,’ he said. ‘The problem is only that the administrators get greedy, so there’s too much of it. There’s also too much help for the batter, but that’s a problem in all cricket, not just Twenty20. It’s becoming hard work for the bowlers. You need more grass on the wicket to make it a bit more sporting. All everyone wants to see is runs: fours and sixes. I want to see contest, a real contest between bat and ball.’

  ‘But isn’t that the whole point of T20, fours and sixes?’

  He shook his head. ‘Having a fast bowler coming in whizzing the ball past people’s ears, that’s good to watch. I think the crowd likes that too. I
think they like spinners bowling and someone running down the wicket to hit him for six too. And you know, cricket is all about mental. How you think, your attitude to the game, how much you want to improve, how you think about a situation. It’s a bit like life really. And I think Twenty20 and the IPL has taught me a bit of, you know what? Some days I’ll do well, some days I’ll not do so well ...’

  A party of elderly Australian tourists suddenly emerged from the darkness beyond the veranda, wearing knee-length shorts and red Rajasthani turbans. ‘It isn’t Warnie? My God, it isn’t Warnie! Warnie?’ one shouted, jabbing his finger at the cricketer.

  ‘Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Let’s hear you! Go, Aussie! Aussie, go!’ he shouted, jigging up and down, with one hand on his loosely tied turban to prevent it falling off his head.

  Warne gave a kind smile. ‘Listen guys, we’ve got an interview going on here. How about I come over for a photo when we’re through?’

  ‘How often does that happen?’ I asked, as the elderly tourists retreated, cackling with excitement.

  ‘All the time,’ he grimaced, reaching for his cigarettes.

  I asked Warne how he thought India had changed since he had started visiting the country, 15 years before.

  ‘People are a lot more confident now,’ he said. ‘They won’t be pushed around. They won’t get spoken down to. Where before too many Westerners maybe came here and just demanded things. In cricket or whatever, people came from all over the world and thought they were superior. They came to India and sometimes they forgot their manners.’

  He was right. And it was perhaps truer of Australian and English cricketers than most visitors. Until a decade ago, few had a good word to say about India. But now you couldn’t keep them away.

  ‘These days if you speak to Indians like that ...’ said Warne, tailing off. ‘Look, it’s financial. For cricket, full-stop, this is where the money comes from.’

  ‘How have you found captaining Indian players?’ I asked.

  ‘Calm, you gotta be really calm here,’ he said. ‘Occasionally you’ve got to shout, if they’re making the same mistakes game after game. But most of the time it’s about putting your arm around them and making them feel important.’

  It sounded facile but Warne was revered by his players, and not only because of how he praised them. He treated them fairly, which was not usual in India. He told a story about how, after the Royals’ owners had tried to foist a well-connected player on the team, he had threatened to quit. ‘I said, “Fine, it’s your team, but if you do that I’m going home. I’ve made my decision and made the squad, and if you want to put someone in for political reasons, that’s fine. But put me on the next plane back to Australia. I’m not getting involved in the politics of India and I won’t have that at the Royals. Everyone’s treated the same.”’

  Warne was said to be earning around $2 million a year from the Royals. No wonder he was so enthusiastic about the IPL. But when I asked him to compare it to Test cricket, he – like Gilchrist – suggested this was not a useful comparison. ‘For me it’s always about Test cricket,’ said Warne. ‘I don’t think there are too many people who will say, “Look at him: he’s a great Twenty20 player, what an unbelievable player.” They’ll say, “He’s just a Twenty20 player.”’ So it was a good game then, but not that good.

  After the interview ended, Warne picked up his remaining cigarettes and went over to where the Australian tourists were sitting. It had been an hour since they had interrupted us, but he had remembered his promise of a group photo. It must have made their holiday.

  As I made my way towards the exit, I stopped to speak to a group of Royals players, Dravid, the Australian Shaun Tait and the New Zealander Ross Taylor, who were eating dinner together on a nearby table. It was a lovely Rajasthani evening, the fading heat of day ruffled by a desert breeze. When I finally left the hotel I saw Warne, sitting alone on the lawn, bent over his BlackBerry. Maybe he was talking to Hurley, or to his three children in Melbourne, or to his half a million followers on Twitter.

  Midway through the season, the Daredevils had played seven games and lost five. The pre-season fears about the squad were looking to be justified. It was too reliant on Sehwag. He had helped win a game against Punjab with a blistering half-century, but was now struggling with an injury. And when he failed, so did the team.

  The Daredevils’ lack of a decent spinner was another big shortcoming, especially in away games, for which the opposition naturally arranged turning pitches. Irfan was having a terrible time. And the Daredevils’ cut-price Australians, Hopes and Birt, were not putting in the match-winning performances expected of foreign cricketers. Worst of all, as defeat followed defeat, it was being said the Daredevils no longer minded losing. They had started to expect it.

  This disappointment didn’t seem to affect the atmosphere at the Kotla, which was packed for almost every game. That was the upside of the Delhi crowd’s lack of loyalty: it didn’t much mind when Delhi was losing. There was always something else to cheer. Against Kings XI Punjab, Warner, the explosive but unreliable Australian hitter, thrashed a brutal 77. Against Bangalore, the loudest cheers were for a half-century by Virat Kohli, a World-Cup winning batsman playing for the Royal Challengers; and also for a lingering embrace on the giant TV screen between Vijay Mallya’s 23-year-old son Siddharth and his Bollywood girlfriend, Deepika Padukone. The crowd wasn’t too fussed about Kohli’s team-mate Chintu Pujara, who struggled to make seven, then hit a long-hop to midwicket. With his orthodox technique, lovingly honed on the railway ground with his father Arvind, Pujara was not much good at T20.

  Against KKR, the biggest cheers by far were for Shahrukh Khan. I sat behind the boundary-side sofa where he was sitting: the crowd bombarded it throughout the game with screaming and pleading for a wave, a smile, a look. Every half-hour or so, the film star obliged, turning to flash a grin over the top of a well-plumped cushion. And the crowd went wild. Meanwhile his team were putting the Daredevils to the sword.

  More often, I watched from the press box, among an unhappier crowd. There was no great enthusiasm for the IPL there. ‘The only thing you have to remember is that it’s complete rubbish,’ a senior correspondent of The Hindu told me glumly. Indian newspaper journalists can be rather an insecure lot. Less well paid than TV reporters, whom they tend to despise, they protect their dignity jealously. And these cricket reporters, all deeply serious about the game, did not feel it was well served by the IPL.

  All the same, few would criticise the tournament in print. That would have been considered almost unpatriotic, so closely had the league, as a great Indian creation, become associated with national success. Some newspapers were also deeply invested in the IPL, which made it hard for their journalists to cover it objectively. The Times of India owned internet rights to the tournament and the Deccan Chronicle owned a team. Indian sports editors were also unsure how to cover the IPL. Most reported it as they would a 50-over game, with pre-match reports predicting the important face-offs: Malinga versus Sehwag, Warne against Tendulkar, and so on. But that gave T20 too much respect, when Sehwag was just as likely to get out swiping at a journeymen Ranji player as to be out-thought by Malinga. Traditional match reports also seemed unsuited to the format, because no one ever really cared about yesterday’s game.

  In his pokey office in Connaught Place, Delhi’s central business district, Amrit was starting to feel the strain. ‘When the team’s losing, the sponsors start losing interest, fans stop interacting with you on Facebook, the owners get upset, everyone’s unhappy,’ he said miserably. ‘No one wants to support a losing team. You wouldn’t believe some of the abusive messages we’re getting on Twitter and Facebook.’

  I hoped he wasn’t worried for his job. Amrit had been very kind and helpful, and it wasn’t his fault the Daredevils squad had been badly chosen. His troubles also extended off the pitch. The franchise relied on the Delhi cricket association for use of the Kotla and other facilities, and its officers were running Amrit r
agged. Under IPL rules, the local associations were entitled to 20 per cent of the match tickets in return for allowing the franchises use of their facilities. In practice, Delhi’s cricket bosses considered the figure of 20 per cent a matter for constant renegotiation. And this being Delhi, the franchise was additionally being pestered by the police, judges and the municipal government, all of whom wanted their share of match-tickets, as befitted their lofty status.

  As a result, Amrit was rarely able to put more than 60 per cent of the Kotla’s tickets on sale. The rest were given out as freebies. Whatever the advantages to GMR of doing business in India’s capital, this was a steep tax on it. The facilities begrudgingly provided by the Delhi cricket association were also invariably filthy and broken. ‘Their groundstaff are no good, their kit is not clean, their people just don’t care,’ Amrit moaned.

  Bigger concerns about the tournament were starting to emerge. Television viewership was down 25 per cent. Audiences for Hindi soaps, which had suffered during the earlier IPL seasons, were meanwhile holding up. This was the first sign that the IPL was not fated to grow inexorably, and Amrit did nothing to hide his fears.

  ‘I’m extremely worried about the IPL,’ he said. ‘It’s a consumer product, and like any consumer product it needs changing and freshening up all the time. We’ve taken the consumers for granted. You know, we’ve got to be very careful about this. We don’t want to end up with no one watching in the stadium, as if it’s Lancashire against Sussex.’

  This was already the case in Kochi. The Kochi Tuskers Kerala franchise, a controversial addition to the IPL, was in deep trouble. Its investors, a consortium of wealthy Gujarati and Maharashtrian families, had been steered to Kerala by their political protector, Shashi Tharoor. They had planned to market their team in the Arabian Gulf, among its prosperous Keralan expatriate community. But the BCCI wouldn’t allow any matches to be played outside India; and with only a million or so people, Kochi was too small to support an IPL team. Besides, most of the locals preferred football.