Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  Two months after the IPL began, the ECB chairman Giles Clarke welcomed Stanford and his Stanford-emblazoned helicopter – it was actually rented, and just had his company logo painted on – on to the outfield at Lord’s. Then, in front of a perspex box seemingly filled with $20 million in $50 bills, Stanford, flanked by Clarke and ECB chief executive David Collier, unveiled English cricket’s brave new world.

  The match itself, played on 1 November 2008, turned out to be a late Halloween surprise for England. They were eviscerated: bowled out for 99, and their total overhauled by the Stanford Superstars in just 12.4 overs. England left the Caribbean humiliated, and with none of the money intended to douse the IPL flames. Three months later, Stanford was found guilty of an enormous Ponzi scheme and sentenced to 110 years’ imprisonment for fraud in the US. Some West Indies players never got their winnings: they reinvested them in Stanford’s businesses, and then lost everything when Stanford was exposed.

  England’s players were reportedly not averse to playing politics either. Following the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, England’s Test series in India, scheduled for early December, was in jeopardy. Yet despite security concerns England’s players remained keen to travel. When the tour went ahead there were whispers that the allure of the IPL rupee and an urge to appeal to Indian markets and the IPL was a factor in their act of sporting diplomacy.

  The collapse of the Stanford deal left the ECB with no choice but to relax their IPL policy. In January 2009 England’s centrally contracted players agreed a deal permitting them three weeks in the league, a compromise position between Modi’s demand for four weeks and the ECB’s desire for two. The agreement meant England’s Test players would play no first-class cricket before their first Test series of the summer, enraging traditionalists. But ‘the alternative was for England to be the only country that forced its players to choose between playing for country and IPL, and that was a dangerous place to go,’ warned Sean Morris, the Professional Cricketers’ Association chairman.

  At the 2009 auction less than a month later, Flintoff and Pietersen became the league’s most expensive signings, earning contracts worth £750,000 at Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore. Three more England players – Paul Collingwood, Owais Shah and Ravi Bopara – also earned deals. The auction took place while England, with Flintoff, Pietersen and Collingwood in the side, were playing a Test against the West Indies in Jamaica; England collapsed to 51 all out in their second innings to lose spectacularly.

  Despite the agreement, the truce between the ECB and the players remained uneasy. Clarke had explained: ‘What would be said if a centrally contracted player was allowed to go to the IPL, then got injured and couldn’t play in the Ashes?’

  Clarke’s prophecy proved correct. Two Tests into the home Ashes, Pietersen was injured, and his Achilles problem in part blamed on his IPL involvement. Flintoff was also injured during the IPL and retired from Test cricket at the end of the Ashes series. He never played for England in any format ever again.

  The terms of the accord also precluded England players from being embraced by IPL franchises quite as they had hoped. As the IPL matured, franchises’ recruitment became more rigorous and teams started valuing continuity. Signing England players for a mere few weeks, and having them miss the tournament play-offs, became less attractive. Rules regarding players reimbursing their counties often forced them to enter the auction at a high price, further dissuading suitors.

  The bargain also became less advantageous for the ECB: while they had the financial heft to keep their international players onside, the IPL relegated the first Test series of England’s summer to a B-list event, with the IPL either depriving their best opponents of practice time in English conditions, or increasingly leading to star visiting players missing the series altogether. Naturally it was Pietersen who exposed these fissures, in the summer of 2012.

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  The clash between Pietersen and the ECB had long been forewarned. Pietersen, born in South Africa to an English mother and a South African father, only moved to England aged 20 to further a stalling career. His rare batting talents quickly became evident to everyone – no one more than himself. As brilliant as he was on the pitch, he was equally disruptive off it. Pietersen was not encumbered by the English system nor was he afraid to challenge the structures that supported it. It took someone from the outside to force change.

  As a young player, Pietersen’s loud haircuts, tattoos, celebrity girlfriends and cocky swagger antagonised many within the traditionally conservative environment of the England hierarchy. Pietersen’s brief stint as England captain ended in January 2009 when he demanded that England sack their coach Peter Moores. In the event, both lost their jobs.

  The IPL’s rise accentuated tensions between Pietersen and the board, no longer his sole paymasters. Every IPL team would have welcomed Pietersen; after being dumped as England captain, the IPL became even more appealing to him, and he captained Royal Challengers Bangalore in his debut season in 2009. A very uneasy truce continued: England now allowed their best players to play in the IPL – but, unlike players from every other country, they were never able to play a full season because of England’s home fixtures.

  In 2012, a dressing room split, involving Pietersen bad-mouthing his captain, Andrew Strauss, to their opponents South Africa by text culminated in Pietersen being left out of the team. While the coverage focused on the minutiae of player relationships, the IPL was at the heart of the whole affair. Pietersen was furious at head coach Andy Flower’s refusal to countenance his full involvement in the league, and had retired from international limited overs cricket in protest. When Pietersen clashed with Strauss during the second Test of the series, Strauss felt, ‘It was almost as if he was trying to engineer an excuse to turn his back on the team,’ he later wrote in his autobiography Driving Ambition.

  The financial appeal of the IPL was obvious to Pietersen and he was not ashamed to admit it. ‘You only play this game for a short while,’ he said in the film Death of a Gentleman, ‘you’ve got to make the most of your opportunities.’ But for Pietersen, a natural showman, there was more to the IPL than just money. Unlike his increasingly fractured international career the IPL offered Pietersen the adoration that he craved. ‘The IPL had an audience of a billion people in India alone,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘Every time you walk out on to the field there are at least forty thousand people watching you from the stands. Under the floodlights, no matter where you are, the place buzzes and crackles with electricity and excitement.’

  There was also a cricket benefit to playing in the IPL, as Pietersen trumpeted to the ECB. For six weeks the IPL brought the best players and coaches in the world together in an environment where knowledge was shared between players from different countries, allowing players from different cultures to learn from each other. ‘The IPL has become a great global tournament,’ wrote Pietersen. ‘Look at the guys they would be playing with. You can only get better by playing against the best.’

  After the fallout of the summer of 2012 Pietersen was ‘reintegrated’ into the England team and played for England for another year. It proved another uneasy truce. A harrowing 5–0 whitewash in the 2013/14 Ashes opened up old wounds between Pietersen and the rest of the team. Despite Flower’s resignation as head coach, this time Pietersen’s relationships with his teammates, particularly senior figures Alastair Cook and Matt Prior, had seemingly broken down beyond repair. In February 2014 Pietersen’s England career was ended by the ECB who sought to rebuild the team without him. Personal differences had ended Pietersen’s England career, but, it was the conflict over the IPL that caused these to flare up.

  If the tensions caused by the IPL, and T20 generally, were most fervent in England, they were not confined to here. After becoming the first Australian to opt to become a freelance player when still in his 20s, despite his first-class record leading to suggestions he could play in Tests, Chris Lynn forged a fine career as a T20 spe
cialist.

  ‘I guess just the other formats, the longer format, wasn’t for me,’ Lynn explained. ‘It’s frowned upon in Australia, as every little kid’s dream is to wear the baggy green – and I think whilst that’s an amazing achievement, there’s more to life than wearing that baggy green. And do I get judged as a different person because I have one or not? Or my interests are with the shorter format?

  ‘But I think they’re coming around to it. I just think they’ll fall behind if they don’t embrace what the player wants. We’ve seen it in other countries.’

  Lynn crafted a Sheffield Shield double century over eight hours and slammed a Big Bash century in an hour. The T20 hundred was ‘absolutely’ more fun. ‘And I can have a beer that night, and then the next day I might be a bit sore, but I get to do it all again in two, three days’ time. So it’s just something that excites me. And I love that go-hard-and-go-home attitude.’

  ‘I don’t have to stand in the sun for a couple of days and then get my opportunity to bat. I could play three times a week and try to smack the ball out of the park. And obviously the entertainment factor is something that I really enjoy.’

  Pietersen found something similar when, in the year after being sacked by England, he appeared for five different teams in five different leagues: the Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash League, St Lucia Zouks in the Caribbean Premier League, the Dolphins in the RAM Slam T20 Challenge, the Quetta Gladiators in the Pakistan Super League and Rising Pune Supergiant in the IPL. Pietersen’s globetrotting reflected the sport’s direction of travel. For the first time since the 19th century, the best players did not need to be playing international cricket to be in the top earners in the sport.

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  England’s performance in the 2015 World Cup was like a compendium of their greatest hits of limited overs incompetence. It was not merely that England were trounced by Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, and then were defeated by Bangladesh to fail to qualify for the quarter-finals. It was also that their way of playing ODI cricket was exposed as anachronistic, overly cautious and rigid, completely oblivious to how big hitting – and T20 – had reshaped the game.

  ‘What’s really happened in this tournament which has come home to me is the crossover between T20 and 50-over cricket now. It’s immense,’ Paul Downton, the managing director of English cricket, told the ECB website, seeming shocked at how rapidly T20 had changed the norms in ODI. ‘It is a fact that not many of our players play much T20 cricket full stop, whether that be abroad or at home. That to me is the biggest lesson coming out of this tournament: how much T20 is influencing one-day cricket now.’

  The 2015 World Cup was not an isolated instance of English ignominy in the tournament. From 1996 to 2015, England played 26 games against Test-playing opposition in the World Cup, and won only seven of them – including losing every single time they played any of Australia, India or New Zealand. Across the three World Cups from 2007 to 2015, Ireland defeated more Test nations than England in the World Cup.

  Within two months of England’s exit, Downton and Peter Moores, the coach, had both been sacked. Andrew Strauss, Downton’s successor, identified improving England’s abject form in both ODIs and T20s – where England had stumbled upon a side to win the T20 World Cup in 2010, but they had swiftly regressed to their normal struggles, failing to reach the knockout stages in both 2012 and 2014, when they lost to the Netherlands – as a priority.

  Strauss was not an obvious figure to be at the vanguard of England’s white-ball revolution. Educated at Radley – one of England’s most exclusive private schools – he was viewed as the embodiment of English cricketing conservatism. The Test team Strauss captained reached the top of the world rankings through an attritional style of play, and he was never as effective – as either a batsman or captain – in white-ball cricket.

  He was also one of Pietersen’s major opponents on being able to play in the IPL more extensively; in Pietersen’s autobiography he compared talking to Strauss about the IPL in 2012 to ‘speaking to the vicar about gangster rap’. Yet, after he took over as director of England cricket in May 2015, Strauss embraced Pietersen’s view of the IPL, changing the ECB’s stance on the competition decisively.

  In 2014 Strauss was invited to the IPL final in Bangalore. He was taken aback by what he saw. ‘I think the IPL is a brilliant thing to have happened to cricket,’ he told the IPL’s official website. ‘You look at the calibre of the players who are playing here and it is really taking the game of cricket forward. It’s really difficult to say anything negative about this tournament. It’s been a fantastic addition to the game. To sample it in the flesh is the best way to figure out how good it is . . . It’s a bit tricky with the English season clashing with the IPL. But I think it would be great if players from England could participate as it would benefit them a lot.’

  Strauss’s U-turn came too late for Pietersen but it was also vindication for his tireless crusade. It is tempting to label Pietersen as being ahead of his time; in reality the rest of English cricket was simply lagging behind.

  ‘Clearly there were other pressures brought to bear around that time. There was a decision not to make players from the UK available to IPL in the early stages. In retrospect that might have been out of a misunderstanding of what IPL was all about,’ said Tom Harrison, who became chief executive of the ECB in 2015. ‘There were some real growing pains around how T20 was going. You’ve got to understand the context of how confusing times were then and the kind of pressures that might have been around.’

  After Strauss was appointed director of cricket, he resolved that England should appoint a head coach based largely on their pedigree in limited overs cricket, for the first time ever. Strauss recruited Trevor Bayliss, who had coached Sri Lanka to the final of the 50-over World Cup, and twice won the IPL with Kolkata Knight Riders. In his contract, Bayliss was given a healthy bonus for winning the 2019 World Cup, which England were hosting and the ECB identified as a crucial opportunity to reinvigorate the sport in the country. Strauss was also decisive in retaining Eoin Morgan, who had only been appointed ODI captain two months before the World Cup – the ultimate hospital pass – and empowering him to shape England’s white-ball revolution.

  In England’s first match after the 2015 World Cup, captain Morgan was 5,000 miles away, playing for Sunrisers Hyderabad in the IPL. Such was Strauss’s determination that English players should get more IPL exposure.

  ‘There has been a sea change,’ Strauss told ESPNcricinfo later that year. ‘These leagues are a melting pot of different ideas around white-ball cricket. Look at the 2015 World Cup, look at the semi-finalists. I think 38 out of 44 players had played in the IPL. You’re going to get great experiences of playing under pressure. Over the last decade or so we’ve been behind a lot of teams in white-ball cricket. It seems an opportunity that we cannot afford to turn down.’

  In the following auction only three England players were sold, but in 2017 that number rose to ten. In 2018, 13 appeared, including those picked up as injury replacements. Once a curiosity, now English players in the IPL were seen as essential both for the teams and by the England national side.

  ‘The IPL experience is an invaluable one to learn and play against the best players in the world in those situations,’ explained Jos Buttler, whose international career was reinvigorated by the IPL. ‘I’ve learned a lot about myself and how to get the best out of myself.’

  Playing in the IPL was also instrumental in Morgan’s development. ‘I got to play with Anil Kumble, Rahul Dravid was in the same team; Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher, Dale Steyn, Kevin Pietersen,’ he said. ‘Watching how these guys went about the new format was really interesting because they were very experienced, skilful cricketers but they were throwing themselves into it like kids.’

  A little like Pietersen, though without antagonising his teammates in the process, Morgan was ahead of his time in embracing the IPL. In 2013, Morgan played in the IPL after being dropped from the Test
team, against the wishes of the head coach. ‘Andy Flower called me and said, “If you want to get back in the Test team, you have to come back,”’ Morgan later told the Cricket Monthly. ‘And I argued, “No, I’m learning more here for the last two seasons and this season, even if I’m not playing well, than I’ve learned in four years of county cricket. So with all due respect I’m going to take this opportunity.”’

  For Morgan, the benefits of the IPL were psychological as well, and extended beyond simply the player involved. ‘When you have the biggest tournament in the world, demanding the best players in the world, when there are players go for large sums of money, it’s a compliment to them as a player to start with but it also brings added pressure,’ he observed. ‘When our top players go and perform there under massive pressure and one of them becomes the MVP [most valuable player, as Stokes did in 2017] and the others are the talk of the town it does bring confidence to our squad and reinforce that the skill level we are constantly producing and competing against each other in the team is actually moving forward. It’s as good as anything else in the world so for the young guys coming through it actually makes the IPL a lot closer than it used to be because we only had a couple of players that ever went and it was seen as a bit of a taboo place to go.’

  On occasion, IPL experience appeared to be more impediment than benefit. In 2017 Jason Roy went to the IPL as England’s potential tournament winner in the Champions Trophy, played in England soon after. He left the IPL having played three games out of a possible 14, including one batting, incongruously, at six rather than as an opener. His form disintegrated, and he was dropped during the Champions Trophy.