by Tim Wigmore
‘The game has changed in that sense. Now people are seeing how talented batsmen are and how good they are and actually as a bowler there’s not a hell of a lot you can do. You just have to accept sometimes that guys are that good. It’s a matter of how can I limit the damage? If I can limit that damage to an acceptable amount then we have more chance of winning.’
This was a remarkable mindset for a professional sportsman to adopt but it was emblematic of the balance of power in the format. Fast bowlers in T20 had little choice.
EIGHT
FROM WAR OF THE WORLDS TO KINGS OF THE WORLD
‘Every decision in T20 cricket should be an aggressive decision. It should be to try and get a hundred, it should be to try and take a wicket . . . It goes against human reactions. We have a safe nature. When you peg back you feel safe. But you should go the other way’
England captain Eoin Morgan
Every year in early April, two photographs were invariably spotted in the sports pages of English newspapers. One would show a county cricket match played in front of thousands of empty plastic seats and under dark, leaden skies. In the foreground there would normally be one or two spectators – old men wrapped up in winter clothing and a blanket, perhaps with a dog or a picnic hamper at their side, a flask in their lap and a newspaper crossword in their hands. The other photograph would be of an IPL match, but rarely the cricket. Instead it would show scantily clad cheerleaders, leaping in the air in celebration, pom-poms in hand, their perfectly made-up faces beaming at the camera, flames, smoke and confetti licking the side of the frame. Behind them would be thousands of rapt fans.
The comparison was so regularly rolled out that it quickly became hackneyed. But it struck at the heart of a schism that would gnaw away at English cricket: a collision of the old world and the new.
The IPL allowed players to earn more in six weeks than many had earned in their entire careers. The average IPL salary for international players in 2008 was £213,000 and the biggest was worth £750,000; many contracts vastly outstripped even the largest international alternatives at the time, estimated to be worth around £500,000. Happily for players of almost all nationalities, the IPL, played in April and May, came at a time of year when their schedules were generally quiet.
There were two major international teams where this wasn’t the case. Most severely afflicted were the West Indies, where international contracts were worth relatively little and player relations with the board were often terrible. Many players regularly chose club over country, rejecting central contracts from the board, and remained in India while weakened teams took to the field in home internationals or on tours of England. Paradoxically, the very strength of West Indies in T20 meant that their Test team was particularly depleted by the format.
But the clash was starkest with England. The start of England’s home season clashed directly with the IPL. Each year, while the IPL got under way in India, several thousand miles away in England the traditional first-class season – played by the 18 counties, with origins in the 19th century – began. It was the ultimate contrast between the past and the future.
As the IPL season reached its climax, England’s international summer would begin, typically with a series against one of international cricket’s smaller, poorer teams – New Zealand in 2008 and 2013, West Indies in 2009 and 2012, Bangladesh in 2010 and Sri Lanka in 2011 and 2014. These sides often arrived in England with depleted squads. Their leading players would only land in the country a couple of days before the Test series began: in 2008 five New Zealand players missed warm-up matches in England to play in the IPL instead. Sometimes players would even be absent for the Tests completely.
English cricket’s opposition to the IPL ran deeper than it cared to admit. The IPL represented more than simply a challenge to the start of England’s traditional season; it amounted to an assault on the notion that English cricket, and what were considered its values and traditions, somehow still represented the pinnacle of the sport.
For half a decade Kevin Pietersen, England’s best and brashest cricketer, feuded with England over whether he would be allowed to embrace the IPL. ‘To me it’s an English cricket problem,’ wrote Pietersen in his book. ‘A problem about India. A problem about money.’
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Cricket had originated in England and was spread to disparate parts of the globe on the vessels of the British Empire. For the large majority of the 20th century England remained the sport’s focal point: its financial and political force, even if England were seldom among the best international teams. Until 1993, England and Australia, the two old-world powers, both retained the power of veto in the body that became the ICC. England ‘has not got over the Raj hangover,’ said I.S. Bindra, then president of the BCCI at a famously tempestuous meeting at Lord’s in 1993. ‘We in the subcontinent want to prove to the rest of the world that whatever they can do, we can do better.’
In the years that followed, power in world cricket shifted irrevocably east. The Asian bloc shared the hosting of World Cups in 1996 – a seminal moment in the commercialisation of cricket – and then 2011. Bangladesh became the tenth Full Member of the ICC in 2000, adding to the bloc’s clout. In 2005, the ICC moved their offices from Lord’s, where the organisation had resided since its formation in 1909, to the desert of Dubai so they could take advantage of more lenient taxation. The symbolism was unavoidable: cricket was no longer a sport run by the Lord’s suits.
All the while, the Indian economy and satellite TV boomed in unison. For Indian cricket, demography was destiny. Other countries were kept afloat by the cash earned from incoming tours by India, so knew to vote with India in ICC board meetings. ‘Things have changed since the old imperial days,’ wrote Pietersen in his autobiography. ‘Big style.’
Before the IPL, as rich and powerful as the BCCI had become, one crucial fact remained: India needed someone to play against. While political differences prevented regular meetings against Pakistan, matches against England remained the most lucrative. Dominance off the pitch was one thing but there was still something to be said for victory on it as well. So although the BCCI was wealthier than it had ever been, it still needed English cricket and more broadly the international game to provide competition and relevance.
The IPL marked the Americanification of Indian cricket: sport as an international event, with the best players from the world over, but with an Indian team always winning. The single most significant consequence of the league was how it redefined cricket’s economy from one that was entirely reliant on international competition to one that seemingly had the potential to survive without it. The Indian broadcasting rights to the first ten years of the IPL were sold to Sony for $908 million. Now, India did not need the rest of the world to get rich from playing cricket.
‘For football the money comes from Europe and the popularity comes from Africa and South America and the players come from everywhere,’ observed Sanjog Gupta, the executive vice-president of Star TV Network. ‘That’s not true for cricket. The money comes from India – the Indian subcontinent – the players come from India, the popularity comes from India.
‘In the Indian fans’ eyes the IPL is not a domestic tournament because it actually has the best in the world playing in it,’ Gupta explained. ‘We don’t believe that fans watch IPL and think they’re watching domestic cricket. Yes they’re watching a lot of Indian players but they’re watching IPL because they believe they’re getting the best T20 cricket possible.’
The IPL presented an economically and socially liberalised India to the world. The author Aravind Adiga described in an interview with The Guardian how the IPL had inverted cricket’s power structure. ‘This game that in some ways began in England and was . . . an aristocratic backlash against emergent industrial capitalism – that game has become the spearhead of the new Indian capitalism. There has been a democratisation of cricket . . . cricket has spread both away from the big cities and down the social hierarchy.’
In Jame
s Astill’s book The Great Tamasha, published in 2013, the then-BCCI vice-president Niranjan Shah gave a glimpse of the BCCI’s imagined future. ‘Like in baseball, America is not worried about whether any other country is playing or not,’ Shah declared in a statement that caused consternation around the cricket world. Whether or not the BCCI would – or even could – break away from international cricket was moot; the very threat that they might was enough. India now ruled cricket; England, like everyone else, were merely acquiescent.
England’s fractious relationship with the IPL was exacerbated by the inevitable comparisons with county cricket. The county game was an anachronism seemingly out of place in this new world, but an institution with roots deep in the soil of English cricket. County cricket was unglamorous and attracted modest crowds but it fostered 18 first-class teams which remained central to nurturing the game in England and had a rich history dating back more than 150 years. Many cricket fans in England resented anything that threatened to undermine county cricket. With its cheerleaders, city-based teams and blaring music the IPL was everything that county cricket was not.
Writing in The Spectator magazine in 2018 the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft embodied the attitude of English traditionalists towards the game’s direction of travel in a withering diatribe. ‘Sixty years ago there were 18 cricket matches – real cricket, first-class matches, played over several days, with two innings a side – at Lord’s during June and July. Thirty years ago that had shrunk to five. This year there’s just one, Middlesex playing Warwickshire in what’s left of the county championship at the end of July,’ he wrote. ‘Otherwise it’s a monotonous diet of one-day matches and “T20 Blast”, the infantilised game of Twenty20Trash, a parody of cricket and a perfect parable of our age, with a subtle and elegant game sexed up and dumbed down.’
The English media perpetuated distrust of the IPL. In the early years of the league, coverage of the cricket itself barely existed in England. The first two seasons were televised on the subscription channel Setanta Sports, tucked well away from the eyes of all but the most ardent sports fans. When ITV acquired the rights – and broadcast every match on the free-to-air channel ITV4, the first cricket on terrestrial television in England in half a decade – broader media coverage remained threadbare, even though viewing figures sometimes exceeded half a million, vaulting past ITV’s expectations. It wasn’t so much that the English media couldn’t see the IPL; it was more that they didn’t want to. The little coverage that existed mostly belittled the league; like the ECB themselves, English cricket’s media gave the impression of being offended and threatened by the IPL.
‘What’s really changed cricket isn’t so much T20T [sic] itself as its supreme incarnation in the Indian Premier League, which now completely dominates, and dictates to, the whole game,’ wrote Wheatcroft. In response, he advocated ‘a Campaign for Real Cricket’.
County cricket, previously largely ignored, was suddenly held up as a paragon of virtue in comparison to the seedy private ownership of the IPL. Not only did the IPL and T20 threaten the county game; some believed it threatened the entire edifice of the sport.
‘Everything worthwhile about it is being destroyed,’ wrote the former editor of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack Matthew Engel in The Guardian in 2017. ‘Its culture that the umpire’s decision is final; the delicate balance between bat and ball as the game degenerates into a six-hitting contest; and that even more delicate balance between individual and team.’
Perhaps most of all, the IPL frightened English cricket. It was, after all, the ECB who had created the T20 format back in 2003. Much like with the creation of one-day cricket in the 1960s, English cricket had again been at the forefront of change in the sport. Yet T20 had huge unintended consequences for cricket’s global balance of power, restructuring the sport’s economy and entrenching India’s hegemony. Thanks to T20, ‘cricket is now more known as a vibrant Asian sport than a traditional English sport,’ reflected Jon Long, the ICC’s former head of strategy.
England’s place in this new world was alarmingly uncertain. ‘Despite having created and developed the Twenty20 format. England failed to see its potential and the fact is, they are gutted that India has got a hold of the strongest tournament in world cricket,’ wrote Pietersen. ‘The ECB have been trying to get the genie back in the bottle ever since.’
The IPL triggered copycat leagues in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Caribbean with private ownership and city-based teams, while Australia and South Africa overhauled their T20 competitions to make them more appealing to broadcasters. For England, modernisation was more complicated: the ECB tried rebranding their existing T20 competition to broaden its appeal, but it remained an 18-county competition. Central to the popularity of the IPL was that the eight-team system was perfect for television with no two matches played simultaneously, allowing every match to be televised as a stand-alone event. This simple structure helped teams establish identities and let narratives take hold, particularly among more casual fans unable to or uninterested in keeping track of many more teams and hundreds of players.
England’s 18 first-class counties gave the game roots around the country but they did not lend themselves to blanket broadcasting coverage. The couch was the new grandstand. In 2010 England’s T20 competition featured 151 matches of which 135 were played simultaneously and just 35 were televised. The problem for the ECB was that the 18 counties held the votes required to force change and a two-thirds majority was required to establish a more streamlined competition featuring fewer teams. Plans to create an English Premier League, based at what was then nine Test match venues, collapsed in 2008 – to the great frustration of Eoin Morgan, according to his then Middlesex teammate Ed Smith. ‘On the morning of a Middlesex T20 match, Morgan saw a newspaper report saying the EPL was not going to happen after all. He was not impressed,’ Smith later wrote.
As the world transformed, English cricket was gripped by existential angst. ‘We are in a war of ideas and we are not confident about our allies,’ wrote ESPNcricinfo’s UK editor David Hopps. ‘Whether we know it or not, when we watch the IPL, it is our fears about our own future that trouble us . . . It is entirely natural that even those of us in England who quite like the IPL resent it at the same time.
‘The glamour of the IPL is a reminder of our weakening economic power, of the sense that we are a nation in decline. While the IPL parades its power, England gets a glimpse of how we used to be.’
Despite the lack of warmth and more general suspicion from the wider media, between 2015 and 2018 viewing figures for the IPL in the UK rose 40%. By the 2019 season even the BBC carried live commentary of every IPL match – a recognition that the IPL could no longer be ignored.
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Initially it seemed as if the ECB could navigate this new terrain. No England players signed up to the first IPL auction, with the league likely to clash directly with international commitments. Even after the auction both Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, the two England players most likely to attract the interest of franchises, pledged their immediate futures to the national team.
The league’s impresario Lalit Modi accepted a first season impasse, even while making it clear that the IPL was coming for England’s players. Weeks later, Hampshire all-rounder Dimitri Mascarenhas became the first English player to join the league when he was picked up in the second mini auction by Rajasthan Royals. Although Mascarenhas occasionally featured in England’s ODI and T20 teams, he was not a centrally contracted England player and therefore the power to let him play rested with his county, Hampshire. Even they provided ‘a lot of resistance’, Mascarenhas recalled; Hampshire only allowed him to go for two weeks, to miss as little county cricket as possible. Mascarenhas played a solitary match in the 2008 season but he was the lone English player to do so. He became a quiet revolutionary.
Mascarenhas’ experience that April and May, shifting between county cricket and the IPL, distilled the shift under way in cricket. ‘The IPL was total
ly different – 50,000 Indians, who are just more passionate than any nation you can imagine about cricket, just screaming and shouting the whole time. The noise was just relentless. It was a proper atmosphere,’ he recalled. ‘I always called for more English players playing straightaway. They could only benefit from that experience.’
As the inaugural season sparked into life, England’s players, even from afar, observed what a paradigm shift the IPL represented. Pietersen was the first player to request that England adjust their schedule to allow players to feature in the league. Within weeks stories surfaced that Pietersen was already close to agreeing a deal for the following season – even though, in theory, no franchise could bid for him until the auction.
Tensions between the players and the board bubbled beneath the surface. Ravi Bopara and Luke Wright, two players on the fringe of England’s white-ball teams, were dissuaded from playing in the IPL after the ECB warned them that doing so would not be viewed favourably and could harm their England careers.
The ECB were deeply suspicious of the IPL and well aware of the threat that it posed. This much was made apparent by their astonishing liaison with the Texan billionaire Allen Stanford.
In 2006 Stanford, who had ostensibly made millions dealing in real estate in the US and later established a bank, became a significant benefactor to West Indian cricket. He promised to reinvigorate sport in the region with a $28 million investment and launched a T20 competition among the Caribbean islands. Stanford quickly eyed bigger prizes. In 2008, he approached both the Indian and South African boards with an offer to play an annual $20 million winner-takes-all match against a Caribbean XI, featuring the region’s best players as selected by him. Both India and South Africa rejected Stanford’s offer. The ECB, aware of the opportunity such a match posed to ameliorate players who had missed out on IPL cash, had no such qualms.
