It has been called the future of cricket, and it has also been called the death of cricket. Love it or hate it, you just can’t ignore the Indian Premier League (IPL) that, with a combination of smart selling and even smarter positioning (whoever heard of sports teams having actors as brand ambassadors before?), has captured the mindspace of tens of millions of Indians who swear by cricket—and this, even before a single ball has been bowled.
In some ways, IPL isn’t just about the reinvention of cricket. It is about the transformation of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI)—a lumbering, slumbering organization that, until sometime ago, had lots of money and boasted growing clout in the global cricketing establishment, but not much else.
Then came Lalit Modi, a vice-president at BCCI. And, then, came the Indian Cricket League, Essel Group founder Subhash Chandra’s “private” Twenty20 cricket league. BCCI was quick to use its status as the administrator of cricket in India to classify the league “unofficial”, even “rebel”—that means cricketers who play for ICL cannot be picked even for their states. It also managed to convince the boards of most countries to do the same. And BCCI also announced that it would launch its own Twenty20 league.
Photoimaging by Manoj Madhavan / Mint
All that happened before India unexpectedly won last year’s world Twenty20 championship. Had the country lost in the initial rounds, IPL could well have remained a non-starter—but India won. The tournament, held in South Africa, also proved that there was an audience for Twenty20 matches. Here was one form of cricket where people could actually work during the day, spend 3 hours in the evening watching a match (one where there would always be a result), and maybe go pub-hopping with friends later. No other form of cricket had allowed that in the past: Test cricket is a five-day affair, and one-day cricket is an all-day one.
In some ways, the concept of IPL isn’t new. Modi, the league’s chairman and commissioner and probably one of the most powerful men in world cricket today, says that for a long time, he has dreamed of city-based teams. He floated the idea in 1996. For nearly a decade, he did little, perhaps because he was not part of the group that ran Indian cricket. And then, as 2005 came to an end, so did former BCCI chief Jagmohan Dalmiya’s reign.
In early 2006, Modi, elected vice-president of BCCI, talked about his plans in an interview with Tehelka magazine: “The intercity cricket league is going to happen. It’s my next big project...”
However, when asked about whether it would take on the Twenty20 format that had proved popular in England, South Africa, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Modi seemed less than enthused. “Why not 25-25? Why not 30-30? The issue right now is that the countries advocating it (Twenty20) are only England and Australia. They have a drop in stadium attendance... We have enough crowds.”