Nothing wasted or accidental: how the IPL became the world’s best T20 league

F ourteen years ago, I took a train from Glasgow to Greenock. Sitting all around me were preschool children on a trip to the seaside, one of whom ended up giving me chickenpox. If you’ve never had chickenpox as an adult, take it from me: you do not want to get chickenpox as an adult. For almost three weeks I was quarantined in bed, pale and sweating, barely enough energy to paw at the lurid purple buboes sprouting across my face and torso. Soon my days would congeal around the single leisure activity still open to me: watching the Indian Premier League on a rickety stream.

To this day it remains the only IPL season I watched from start to finish. It was only the second staging of the tournament, and even at the time what struck me most of all was how little idea anybody seemed to have about anything: tactics, strategy, squad building, team composition, whether 150 was a good score, whether Jacques Kallis was suited to the format or not. Spin came in two kinds. I don’t recall seeing a single scoop shot or relay catch. Everyone seemed to be grinning. Unknown players with a unique selling point (Kamran Khan, anyone?) could catapult themselves to stardom virtually overnight. It was a fascinating process of watching a sport evolve and falter and think things through in real time.

The IPL is at that sort of advanced age now where it is possible to trace the progress made, perhaps even to feel a kind of faint nostalgia for the improvised tactics and haphazard fielding that used to characterise it. Certainly it used to attract its fair share of derision in England: for its armies of ageing mercenaries, its over-the-top salesmanship, its determination to sponsor everything in sight. For various reasons you hear less of that