Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  The ICL amounted to a profound threat to the Indian board. Effectively it challenged their monopoly on scheduling cricket in the country, just as Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket had in Australia 30 years earlier. Realisation of how the ICL imperilled their position drove the BCCI to confront it.

  First came a brutal clampdown. Any player who signed with the league was threatened to be banned for life from cricket organised by the BCCI. ‘Our stand is very clear,’ said the BCCI secretary Niranjan Shah. ‘Players who take part in the ICL will never be eligible to play for the country again. It is up to the players to decide what they want to do.’ The BCCI used their huge influence in world cricket to pressurise the ICC, and then other national boards, not to recognise the competition. Anyone who signed up risked never being able to play international cricket again.

  Second came imitation, and an embrace of Modi’s plan. Two days after the inaugural T20 World Cup began in South Africa, the BCCI announced that they would launch the IPL the following April. For the first time in cricket, this would comprise privately owned teams. At the official launch of the IPL in September 2007 Modi was named as the league’s convener. Now he could make good on the vision he had outlined two years earlier, when he declared, ‘Cricket in India is a $2 billion-a-year market. We are sitting on a gold mine. Our players should be paid on a par with international footballers and NBA stars, in millions of dollars and not measly rupees.’

  In the months ahead, Modi relentlessly signed up dozens of the world’s greatest players to agree to join the league. Given that players stood to earn up to £1 million for six weeks, this proved little challenge.

  India’s victory in Johannesburg had spurred interest in the country in T20, leading Modi to seal a £500 million broadcasting deal, over ten years, even before the identity of any of the teams was known. The eight teams were sold for a total of £367 million, payable to the BCCI over a decade. The owners included film stars Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty, ensuring a perfect synergy of cricket and Bollywood. The BCCI had made almost £1 billion even before a ball had been bowled in the IPL, one of the most audacious inceptions to any sporting league in history.

  On 20 February 2008, a collection of India’s richest businessmen and biggest Bollywood stars lined up at the Hilton Towers Hotel on Mumbai’s western waterfront at 11 a.m. By the time they left that afternoon, they had spent £21 million on contracting 78 players for a seven-week tournament – and cricket had entered a new age.

  The auction was not just designed to distribute players between teams. It was designed to be ‘the opening episode in the new series of the soap opera’, recalled Andrew Wildblood, the joint architect of the IPL alongside Modi. ‘The auction is the best possible trailer for the new series.’

  ONE

  NEVER FEAR THE AIR

  ‘You have to travel at such speeds that you’re going to come off the road occasionally’

  Brendon McCullum

  After facing five of the first six balls of the match, Brendon McCullum had still not scored a run. In T20 cricket – he would later acknowledge – that is almost worse than getting out. The first over had been bowled by Praveen Kumar, an intelligent seam bowler who bowled a tight line and had given McCullum no room to free his arms and attack.

  ‘I was swinging at every one of them but I was missing every one by a foot,’ he recalled. ‘I don’t normally get nervous but for that innings I really was. I was batting with Sourav Ganguly and Ricky Ponting was at three. There were 45,000 people in an atmosphere I’ve never experienced anything like before.’

  McCullum, a New Zealander renowned for his ebullient attacking approach, had been in terrible form in the nets in the lead-up to the start of the inaugural IPL season. Sharing a dressing room with legends of the game such as Ganguly and Ponting after being sold at the player auction for the life-changing fee of £355,000, the 26-year-old felt an unusual pressure to justify both his presence and his price tag at cricket’s transformative new tournament. He would be playing for the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), one of the most glamorous teams, owned by the Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan.

  As the first match of the season drew nearer, McCullum had been so out of sync that Matthew Mott, Kolkata’s assistant coach, decided to have some one-on-one time with him in the nets, feeding him balls from a bowling machine in an effort to help him regain some rhythm. After an hour of fruitless effort Mott decided to abandon the session and instead took McCullum to the hotel bar for a beer. That seemed to relax him and he scored 40 and 50 in consecutive warm-up matches over the next few days. Suddenly he felt like he belonged at the crease again.

  One over into the first IPL match, that feeling of belonging had deserted him once more. The IPL had been launched earlier that evening with a dazzling opening ceremony featuring lasers, fireworks and Bollywood stars but the quiet start to the match had sucked energy from the stadium.

  There was more to this match than the result. Despite the millions of dollars of investment and despite there being one billion cricket fans in India, until that night the IPL was little more than a concept. ‘We really needed that one spark which would set the IPL’s inaugural season alight,’ said the league’s impresario Lalit Modi in James Astill’s book The Great Tamasha. ‘I was sceptical, I had my doubts, I was always afraid deep down. At the end of the day, if the consumer didn’t buy it, there was nothing more we could do.’

  McCullum played and missed at the first ball of the second over, too: he was now on nought off six balls. ‘It was swing out or get out,’ said McCullum, who recognised that he would be more use to his team sitting back in the dugout than staying out in the middle using up valuable balls. This enlightened approach demonstrated an intricate understanding of the nature of T20. It was about to define the most critical innings of his life.

  ‘If it’s not meant to be then it’s not meant to be,’ McCullum recalled thinking. ‘Just keep swinging.’ That the next ball was full and in McCullum’s arc was essentially irrelevant; he was attacking anyway and slogged across the line of the ball. McCullum regularly cited the role of luck in a game with margins as fine as T20; his shot was one that could have lobbed to the fielder just as easily as it could have cleared him. He got just enough on the ball to get it over the fielder’s head and score four. The crowd roared; McCullum – and the IPL – had their first boundary. ‘I just kept swinging and something clicked. I don’t know what it was but suddenly I calmed down a lot and then I was able to do what I did which pretty much changed my life.’

  What followed in the next hour and a half was one of the most significant and spectacular innings in cricket history. McCullum, clad in the space-age black and gold livery of the Knight Riders, blazed an absurd 158 not out off 73 balls – an individual score that would remain a world record for five years.

  McCullum’s innings contained 13 sixes, each shot like fireworks into the night sky. The Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) bowling attack comprised international standard bowlers but McCullum treated them with disdain – brazenly charging out from his crease, carving the ball over the off side and heaving it over the leg side. This was batting that propelled cricket into a new age. ‘To score a hundred in a T20 game was an amazing achievement,’ recalled John Buchanan, the Knight Riders’ head coach. ‘But to score 158 . . . He certainly redefined or at least told everybody what T20 cricket could be if you took in the right mindset, were aggressive, had a bit of luck and just had the courage and bravery to keep going.’

  For Modi and the IPL it was the perfect beginning. The stadium was in a frenzy. It didn’t matter that McCullum was playing for the away team – this was an innings of the purest entertainment. The runs surged and the music blared – Kolkata’s owner Shah Rukh Khan was dancing in the aisles. ‘It was when Brendon hit what he hit that I knew it [the IPL] would work,’ Modi told Astill. ‘It was slam-dunk cricket. The ball was being hit out over the ropes, you had people screaming and shouting and jumping. The next day I went to Bren
don and said thank you very much for making my tournament a success. To me he was my hero. The man who fast-tracked my dream into a reality.’

  In truth the IPL would have worked anyway. The power in cricket had been shifting eastwards from England – the cradle of the game – to India – the sport’s financial behemoth – for decades. The IPL, with its heady cocktail of money, cricket and Bollywood, was the distillation of this change. McCullum’s impudent 158 not out was the emblem of a new age.

  The inaugural IPL was a runaway success: television ratings were huge and stadiums were packed. ‘Although it is impossible to be sure from such a recent perspective,’ wrote Scyld Berry in his Editor’s Notes of the 2009 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, ‘it looks as though the supranational IPL is the single biggest change in cricket not merely since the advent of the limited-overs game in the 1960s but of fixtures between countries in the 19th century: that is, since the invention of international or Test cricket.’ Berry was right; the IPL was a tournament that would change cricket forever.

  Instantly, the IPL recalibrated the entire economics of the sport. Until the IPL, cricket had been a game dominated and entirely funded by international competition. This was in contrast to the world’s other major sports – football, basketball and baseball – where club competition was predominant. Cricket’s reliance on international competition left it vulnerable to the natural imbalance of nation against nation contests, with talent restricted by borders.

  Although T20 leagues had existed before the IPL they were comparatively tame, featuring almost exclusively local domestic players and none of the razzmatazz. The nature of the IPL – with private ownership, celebrity influence and vast sums of money – changed everything. The IPL alerted cricket boards to the potential value of their domestic game. Within ten years major leagues with the potential to attract the world’s best players had been established in Australia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Caribbean and England. Together with the IPL these six leagues established a year-round T20 circuit, running parallel to, and in direct competition with, the international game and sometimes each other.

  It was apt that McCullum played that momentous innings, for very few other players have so embodied T20 cricket’s essence. Here was cricket – compressed and radicalised, heightened and elevated. And here was McCullum – a hurricane of a cricketer, fiercely competitive, a stunningly audacious batsman, an all-action wicketkeeper or fielder, depending on his team’s needs, and a sportsman who conceived of himself as an entertainer. ‘You literally feel like a gladiator in a coliseum. There’s 35,000 people, they’ve all turned up to watch you play and wishing you well but if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work but you still get up and go again . . . T20 definitely aligned with my style of cricket.’

  ***

  Growing up in the 1980s McCullum’s hero was the legendary West Indian batsman Viv Richards. Richards was one of the first players to reconfigure cricket’s traditional approach to batting by eschewing defence in favour of attack.

  ‘The big change really came from a mindset point of view,’ explained Simon Katich, who played 56 Test matches for Australia and enjoyed T20 success as a player and a coach. ‘We were always taught to value our wicket, but in T20 you need to play with no fear of losing your wicket.’

  This attitude was wound deep into the fabric of the game. In the book The Game of Life, Scyld Berry wrote: ‘When a batsman has been dropped by a fielder we say he was “given a life”. We are saying that a batsman is alive when he is at the wicket. When he is out, therefore, he is dead, killed by the bowler, perhaps aided and abetted by the fielders. If the batsman makes a false stroke, it can be a “fatal” mistake. Thus a dismissal in cricket can be equated to death.’ This elegiac assessment of a wicket distils the psychological depth and weight of batting, and the importance traditionally placed on defence and on wicket preservation.

  Across history Test batting has generally become increasingly attacking. But it wasn’t until the advent of limited overs cricket in the 1960s – with various competitions ranging from 40 overs up to 60 overs – that the game’s tempo began to change. Once the number of deliveries available to a batting team was restricted, as was the case in limited overs matches, batsmen were compelled to place a greater emphasis on run scoring which in turn forced them to compromise their wicket.

  Richards, who made his debut for the West Indies in 1974, was a trailblazer for this aggressive mentality. ‘The first thing that came to mind was the need to attack,’ he explained in an interview with ESPNcricinfo. ‘Sometimes some of us just look to defend. When we think of defending, sometimes we get deliveries that need to be dealt with, and we haven’t quite dealt with them the way we should because we are in such a defensive mode.’ Across his ODI career Richards scored at a rate of 90 runs per 100 balls in an era when players typically scored around 65 runs per 100 balls. Years after he had retired Richards fittingly reversed the defensive foundation of batting by saying in an interview, ‘I would rather have a guy who can play the shots and teach him the defence than a guy who doesn’t have any shots.’ This implied that attacking batting was the more valuable skill, something that went against mainstream opinion in the sport. Attacking batting – often described as slogging – was widely considered uncouth compared to the more noble art of defence and steady accumulation. Hitting across the line was viewed as an indulgence to be resisted until a batsman had played himself in.

  ‘There are good balls and there are bad balls and any time you get a bad ball you’ve got to hit it for runs,’ said the former England batsman Geoffrey Boycott in a masterclass on BT Sport. ‘But you’ve got to remember that in Test cricket there are good bowlers who are going to bowl you good balls so you can’t hit every ball. So you have to learn to stay in.’

  Richards’ approach was partly enabled by his role as a middle order batsman. During his career the typical pattern of a team innings in ODIs was for the opening batsmen – tasked with facing the new ball and the opposition’s best bowlers – to bat cautiously at the start of the innings and lay a platform for the more aggressive players, such as Richards, to capitalise on and accelerate from later. This pattern was inverted at the 1992 World Cup by the moustachioed New Zealander Mark Greatbatch, another player who would leave an indelible mark on the game and on attacking batting.

  The 1992 World Cup, played in Australia and New Zealand, was a modernising tournament. It saw the introduction of new rules to the ODI format including teams wearing coloured clothing and playing with a white ball, but more pertinently it signalled the introduction of fielding restrictions which permitted only two fielders outside a 30-yard circle around the 22-yard strip in the first 15 overs. New Zealand’s coach Warren Lees and captain Martin Crowe – open to innovations to reinvigorate their struggling team – recognised that the fielding restrictions provided an opportunity for quick runs. They asked Greatbatch – despite him playing all 39 of his ODI innings until then in the middle order and being in terrible form before the tournament – to open. Lees and Crowe wanted Greatbatch to bat positively and try to get New Zealand ahead of the game early on.

  That’s exactly what he did. Rather than batting cautiously in the manner of other specialist openers of the era, Greatbatch instead attacked the opening bowlers. In his first innings of the tournament New Zealand were only chasing a modest target of 191 but Greatbatch batted aggressively, flaying the hard new ball against South Africa’s vaunted pace attack. ‘There was a fair bit of adrenaline pumping,’ Greatbatch remembered in an interview on ESPNcricinfo. ‘In those days four an over at the start of the innings was quick. The norm was about three. We were scoring at five or six an over and that was a real shift in momentum.’ Greatbatch continued in a similar vein through the rest of the tournament, blitzing three rapid fifties in all and finishing with 313 runs at a strike rate of 88. New Zealand, riding on the wave of Greatbatch’s early aggression, exceeded expectations and reached the semi-finals. Greatbatch had done more than take his country
deep into the World Cup; he had recalibrated the role of the one-day opener and begun a transformation in the sport.

  New Zealand’s success emboldened others to adopt similar tactics. Sri Lanka were shock winners of the 1996 ODI World Cup thanks largely to their explosive opening partnership of Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana who took Greatbatch’s aggression to another level, both scoring well above a run a ball across the competition. Jayasuriya, whose flashy upper cuts and pick-up pulls expertly cleared the inner ring and exploited the fielding restrictions, racked up 221 runs off just 168 deliveries in another step change for batting. Jayasuriya was awarded man of the tournament despite 16 players scoring more runs than him; how quickly he had scored mattered more than how many he had scored.

  By the turn of the century attacking the new ball and taking advantage of the early fielding restrictions became the new norm. The late 1990s and early 2000s gave birth to a coterie of attacking openers in ODIs: Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist for Australia, Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag for India, Marcus Trescothick for England, Herschelle Gibbs for South Africa, Nathan Astle for New Zealand and Shahid Afridi for Pakistan. The arrival of T20 would galvanise attacking batting once more – but its icons were standing on the shoulders of giants.

  ***

  McCullum’s batting, inspired by Richards and infused with the spirit of his countryman Greatbatch, was perfectly aligned with T20. Like Greatbatch, McCullum was an aggressive shot-maker and like Greatbatch, his role was to take advantage of the Powerplay fielding restrictions, which in T20 lasted just six overs.

  McCullum’s IPL century launched an iconic T20 career. In the decade after 2008 arguably the only batsman to overshadow McCullum’s impact on the format was the monolithic West Indian Chris Gayle. While Gayle’s brilliance was defined by his colossal power, McCullum’s contribution was more profound. McCullum was blessed with rapid hand speed and a wonderful eye, but his defining feature was his mind. If Gayle was T20’s gunslinger, McCullum was its philosopher king.