The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  The Daredevils started well, putting on fifty for the first wicket. But after losing both openers and with nothing left to play for in the tournament, they fell apart. After 15 overs, they had collapsed to 97 for six. As each wicket fell, the crowd boiled over, the cheerleaders pranced about and Preity Zinta, the Kings XI’s film-star owner, swirled a red-and-silver Punjab flag for the cameras. Amrit, sitting slightly apart from us, was hunched forwards, holding his head in his hands.

  After the game, I went to the Kings XI dressing-room to find Zinta. A native of Himachal Pradesh, she was in the process of telling Gilchrist what sightseeing he must do in Dharamshala. ‘There are lots of natural temples, stones, caves, literally thousands of years old,’ she was saying, fixing her doe-eyes on the Australian cricketer. ‘But not idols,’ she said, looking suddenly severe. ‘Because I never worship idols, OK?’ Gilchrist nodded, wearing a neutral expression.

  Zinta was easily the IPL’s biggest Bollywood draw after Shahrukh Khan, with whom she shared more than IPL ownership. The daughter of an army officer, she was another self-made star. She also had a head for business, which she had briefly studied at Harvard.

  Zinta said she would be happy to chat, so we sat down together on boundary-side seats. I asked her why she had got into cricket.

  ‘I was at a stage of my career where I was, you know, the number-one star in India and I was, you know, a little bored,’ she said, flicking a wisp of black hair from her eyes. ‘I’d lost my passion for movies so I decided to concentrate on cricket. I put my passion, my energy into it.’ She shot me a confiding glance and leant forward. ‘You know, I think I concentrated on cricket too much.’

  ‘And what have you brought to your team?’

  ‘Bums on seats. People come to the stadium to see me, even when we’re losing. And of course I’m completely with the team. I’m the glue that binds them together,’ she said, pursing her lips very prettily. ‘When I’m with them, I fly economy. I’d never flown economy before.’

  I agreed that must help a lot. ‘And did you always like cricket?’ I asked.

  Zinta nodded, widening her light brown eyes. ‘People asked me that a lot when I got into this. They said “what do you know about cricket?” And I said, I don’t know much, you know, just fours and sixes. But that’s Twenty20, isn’t it? It’s all fours and sixes. The normal Indian woman doesn’t know who Irfan Pathan is. And I didn’t know who Irfan Pathan was. Well, OK, maybe I did because after all he’s exceptionally cute ...’

  ‘Why else do you think the IPL’s been such a hit?’

  ‘It’s because Indians are so proud of it, because it’s our tournament and all the foreign stars are coming here to play ... I guess somewhere in our psychology we know that we were colonised and that we’re a Third-World country, so it’s a great thing to see these things changing in cricket.

  ‘And, of course, it has to be T20. Five days of cricket? Forget it. Not in this fast-paced world. With full respect to Test cricket, we just don’t have time for it.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Twenty20 Vision

  On a cloudy morning in west London in July 2011, India and England met to play the 100th Test match of their complicated rivalry. It was a great occasion, a full house at Lord’s, brimming with conviviality. In the space-ship press box, as replicated in Rajkot, former Indian and English greats swapped war stories. Out on the pitch, Sharad Pawar and the top brass of the BCCI paraded on the lush green turf of cricket’s home.

  How different this was from the scene of India’s first Test match – also at Lord’s – in 1932. Then, the Indians came as colonial servants to learn cricket from their masters. They had no prospect of actually winning the game. Now, the Indian board was cricket’s paymaster and India the world’s top-ranked Test side and World Cup champions. In Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, they had two all-time great batsmen. Tendulkar was a century away from his 100th international century, an unprecedented feat. Most Indians assumed he would get it, if not today, at some point during the ensuing four-match series. They also expected that India would win.

  But as so often in Indian cricket, the mismatch between a nation’s expectations and reality was jarring. The 1932 Indians surpassed the, admittedly very low, predictions for them. The exalted 2011 lot were blown away. England declared their first innings on 474 for eight, a score that included a magnificent double-century from Kevin Pietersen – which was doubly felicitous for him, considering he was about to negotiate terms with the Delhi Daredevils. They went on to win by 196 runs.

  England won the next three Tests by even bigger margins: by 319 runs at Trent Bridge; an innings and 242 runs at Edgbaston; and an innings and eight runs at the Oval. This was a proper thrashing. The margins of India’s defeats were even bigger than that of their inaugural defeat in 1932. Apart from Dravid, no Indian batsman scored a century in the series.

  Later that year the Indians went to Australia, where they suffered another 4-0 pasting, again by huge margins. This constituted their worst run of away defeats since the 1960s. Even by Indian standards of inconsistency, it was a dramatic slide.

  The euphoria that had followed the 2011 World Cup victory was now a faint memory. It was suddenly apparent that, despite the country’s vast cricket-mad population, India had not one dependable fast bowler. They had no indisputably world-class spinner. They had one of the weakest batting line-ups in Test cricket. After the Australia debacle, Dravid and V.V.S. Laxman – players with 53 Test centuries between them – both retired. That left India with one batsman ranked in the world’s top 20, Tendulkar. And he was 18th in the world, almost 40 years old, and rapidly fading.

  In November 2012 England toured India, and caused a further upset. They were by no means a great team. They had been well beaten by South Africa earlier in the year, leading to the retirement of their captain Andrew Strauss. Many of the players had also fallen out with their best batsmen, Kevin Pietersen, a brittle, brilliant recruit from South Africa, who had never been loved by his team-mates or the English public. The argument was partly caused by Pietersen’s unhappiness at being barred by England from playing a full IPL season, for which he could have earned around $2 million. But the divisions in the team were put aside as England gave the Indians another hiding.

  They won the four-Test series 2-1, to record their first series victory in India since 1985. India’s millionaire cricketers came off worst in every aspect of the game. Their spin-bowlers, Pragyan Ojha and Ravichandran Ashwin, were out-bowled by Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar, who took 40 wickets between them. The English batsmen were in commanding form – Alastair Cook, England’s new captain, scored three centuries and averaged over 80. His opposite number, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, struggled to score a pair of fifties and had an otherwise wretched series.

  His captaincy was criticised, his team looked demoralised, uninterested even. Sometimes so did Dhoni. Tendulkar fared worse. He scored a solitary fifty and came 16th in the series averages. By the end of it, even some Indian commentators were suggesting he should retire. On 23 December 2012, the little master announced his retirement from one-day cricket, a format in which he had scored a staggering 49 centuries for India.

  At a time of great despondency in Indian cricket, there was just one fresh hope. This was a 25-year-old with a calm head and classical technique – Cheteshwar Pujara. After an 18-month absence from the India side – chiefly owing to an injury picked up in the IPL – Chintu was picked to replace Dravid in a short home series against New Zealand, sandwiched between the disastrous tours of England and Australia. In the first Test, in Hyderabad, he hit 159. It was a wonderful innings, calm, rhythmic and occasionally ruthless. I watched it, with growing delight as he neared his century, from the misty English countryside. Too bad the stadium in Hyderabad was barely a quarter full.

  On 99, Chintu flicked the ball off his pads to fine leg and ran through for a single. Joy flooded his long, almost equine, features. As he raised his bat, he glanced at the sky and his lips moved in
prayer. He was giving thanks, I supposed, for the dead mother who had predicted this success, or to his father Arvind, watching at home in Rajkot.

  He still refused to go to the stadium to watch his son. Arvind said he would only be a bother to him; he had also been in poor health. Even when India began their next home series, against England, in the nearby city of Ahmedabad, he therefore declined to attend. In the first innings, Chintu scored 206 not out, and he scored 41 not out in the second, setting India up for a crushing victory. In the second Test of the series, in Mumbai, Chintu scored 135 in the first innings. Indian cricket had a new star, even if India were woeful.

  What had gone so wrong? By the end of 2012, India had slid to fifth in the Test rankings – below their calamitous rivals, Pakistan – and third in the one-day rankings. An easy 4-0 Test victory against Australia, when they returned to India in early 2013 with a bafflingly reduced team, then papered over these failings. But this was still a desperately poor return on India’s cricketing advantages. Astonishingly, India were not obviously better at cricket than when Tendulkar began his long career, despite the vast wealth that had flowed into Indian cricket in the intervening decades. India’s captain, the small-town hero Dhoni, was reckoned to earn over $25 million a year, more than Usain Bolt or Wayne Rooney. Yet he was ranked merely the world’s 40th best batsman in Tests, 30th in T20 and, to his credit, sixth in one-day internationals. Nowhere had the commercialisation of sport caused a greater imbalance between achievement and financial reward than in Indian cricket.

  The same might be said of the BCCI, whose rulers should – but of course did not – take some responsibility for India’s poor performances. It was not hard to see how they might address the issue. They could build thousands of pitches in India’s teeming slums and villages. They could dispatch hundreds of cricket coaches to them, and distribute millions of willow bats and leather balls. They could bolster India’s existing club and district tournaments, most of which struggle in penury, and launch new ones. The BCCI could easily afford these measures, and the results would be dramatic. India’s unique and multitudinous passion for cricket, thus harnessed, would unleash a torrent of sporting talent unprecedented in the history of any game.

  But it will not happen, because the good of Indian cricket is not the chief priority of the politicians who run the BCCI. They are mainly concerned to perpetuate their power. That is why they devote so much time to fighting their nasty civil wars and building Ozymandian stadiums where there are no cricket pitches for poor boys to play on. Yet it is these men that will increasingly decide cricket’s future, in India and elsewhere. Not since the heyday of the MCC, when patrician figures such as Lord Harris presided over cricket in England and everywhere, has a single country exerted such influence over the game as India does today.

  That comparison is interesting. Lord Harris was a haughty British aristocrat. He had, in the cold light of the 21st century, some repugnant views on Indians (as well as a genuine love for India). He also gave himself too much credit, as one historian has shown, for Indian cricket’s early growth. Yet Lord Harris had a real regard and care for cricket. That was why, as MCC president, he supported India’s bid for Test status. It is also why he helped arrange reciprocal tours between the two countries. He had no selfish reason to do so.

  The BCCI, by contrast, accepts no responsibility for cricket’s global health. Nor even for how it fares in its own neighbourhood. Consider, thus, the case of Bangladesh. In 2000 the BCCI successfully campaigned for it to be awarded Test-class status, thereby assuring itself of another captive vote at the ICC. Yet India’s eastern neighbour looked unready for that promotion, and so it has turned out to be. By late 2012 Bangladesh had played 75 Tests, of which it had lost 65 and won three. And India, which bears prime responsibility for this fiasco, has done less than any other Test country to remedy it. It is the only front-rank cricket country never to have invited the hapless Bangladeshis on a Test-match tour.

  As so often with Indian cricket, it is easy to see in the BCCI’s behaviour a wider significance. India’s recent economic growth has transformed its place in the world, giving it an important voice in international negotiations on climate change, trade, energy, security and much else. It has also sent far-flung governments scrambling to understand India’s desires and the nature of Indian diplomacy and power. That is as it should be. Yet if they know cricket, the global arena most affected by India’s new influence, they will be dismayed.

  ‘Are we going to be like America? Will we think we’re the biggest and so you’re all going to do what we say? I fear we are,’ the commentator Harsha Bhogle once told me. He spoke of cricket, but he might equally have been talking of climate change or trade. India is in so many ways an inspiring example to the world: with its liberal traditions, democracy and the ingenuity of its fiercely competitive people. But it can also be, as the world is starting to find, an awkward partner: self-absorbed, often corrupt and overly anxious to be no one’s fool. India is becoming powerful; it will be a long time before it forgets how it felt to be weak.

  The IPL is perhaps the chief illustration of the Indian board’s disregard for cricket’s future good. It is a splendid cricket romp, hugely popular and great fun for players and spectators. But its effect on international cricket has been destructive. When the West Indies arrived in England to play a three-Test series in May 2012, four of their best players were playing in the IPL. You could hardly blame them. Chris Gayle, a Jamaican hitter and one of T20’s biggest stars, had been promised at least a million dollars by the Royal Challengers Bangalore for six weeks’ work. That was several times more than the cash-strapped West Indies board could afford to pay him for a year of international cricket.

  Such clashes could be avoided. If India would only request a six-week pause, or ‘window’, in the international cricket schedule for the duration of the IPL, other countries would be quick to agree to it. For sure, this would be unfair on the new copycat T20 contests in Australia, Bangladesh and elsewhere, for which there could be no such dispensation. But it would be a pragmatic recognition of India’s power in cricket, which might well help shore up the international game. Yet the Indian board, at the time of writing, will not countenance this request. Suspicious and controlling, its bosses apparently fear such a window might make the IPL somehow accountable to other boards. As for cricket in the West Indies, it can go hang. ‘It’s a free world,’ shrugged N. Srinivasan, the latest BCCI president, when asked what could be done about the splintering West Indies team. ‘People and players make their choices and we can’t compel a person.’ Srinivasan is, of course, not wholly impartial in the matter. His family cement company owns the Chennai Super Kings. And perhaps that was a worry to him – because in 2012 the IPL hit serious trouble.

  Its fifth rendition, won by the Kolkata Knight Riders, was the most entertaining yet. Roughly a third of the games were decided in the last over. The tournament also saw bigger and more enthusiastic crowds, not least in Delhi, where the expensively improved Daredevils almost made it to the final. Television viewership was steady.

  But shortly after the tournament ended, it became clear that most of the team-owners were in serious financial difficulty. The ill-advised Kochi franchise had not even made it this far: it was dissolved by the board in September 2011 after its investors failed to pay their bills. Of the nine surviving teams, seven were owned wholly or partly by listed companies, all of which were massively indebted and seeing their stock prices plunge. Together they were estimated to have lost $25 billion in value since April 2008, when the IPL began. Suddenly, some of the exuberant investments that India Inc. had been making in the good times seemed less go-getting than foolhardy.

  The King of Good Times, fittingly, was one of the main casualties. By mid-2012 Vijay Mallya was almost bust. His airline was saddled with $1.7 billion in debts. One of the main arms of his booze business, United Spirits, owed another $1.6 billion. Now at the mercy of the banks, Mallya cut his collar-length hair and swa
pped his silk tracksuits for sober business suits. He sought to tone down his reputation for excess. But the pressure on his company was becoming intolerable. After the wife of one Kingfisher manager hanged herself and left a suicide note complaining that her husband had not been paid for seven months, there were calls in parliament for Mallya to be arrested. In November 2012 he sold most of United Spirits to the British-based company Diageo, and thereby lost control of one of his main sources of wealth.

  Deccan Chronicle Ltd, owner of the Deccan Chargers, was also struggling. It owed over half a billion dollars to 28 different banks, two of which were reported to have been assured of future revenues earned by the IPL team as collateral. This irked the cricket board, which considered it highly irregular. After the usual court battle, it dissolved the Chargers in September 2012.

  The Sahara Group, owner of the Pune Warriors, had even bigger debts. It stood accused of misselling bonds to some 23 million small investors; in August 2012 the Supreme Court ordered it to repay at least $3 billion to them. Sahara – which also operated an airline, film production business and, in partnership with Mallya, the Sahara Force India Formula One team – was one of India’s most unusual companies. Grown from nothing by Subrata Roy, the son of a poor mill-worker, it had powerful political connections and a rather eccentric corporate culture. Sahara’s 700,000 employees hail each other by placing their right arm across their chest and saying ‘Sahara pranam!’ (‘Greetings, Sahara!’) The company now looked to be fighting for its survival.