Fourteen 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 sort of criticism these days. I don’t think anybody would seriously contest the hypothesis that it is now the best Twenty20 league in the world by quality. But as it began its 16th season at the weekend, there was another kind of supremacy being wielded.
During the innings break in the opening game between Gujurat and Chennai, the crowd of over 100,000 was treated to an extraordinary sight: a light show suspended in the sky above Ahmedabad, performed by around 1,500 remote-control drones with LEDs. The drones dispersed and reformed; made up the crests of the two teams, reconfigured themselves into the shape of the IPL trophy. It was a genuinely awe-inspiring display that – if nothing else – puts our cherished Hundred and its roster of local-wedding DJs into a certain perspective.
And if the IPL in its early years was defined by bluster and mis-steps, its most arresting quality these days is a sense of utter certainty: the hard edges of political and financial power muscling a path to your television screen, the complete confidence in the primacy of the product. The IPL is indifferent to your opinion of it. Your presence at the spectacle is not required. But you will be present nonetheless, because Jos Buttler is teeing off at a strike rate of 240, and you will definitely want to watch that.
Nothing here is wasted or accidental. Nothing meets the gaze that is not supposed to meet the gaze. The match-ups are plotted out well in advance. The fielding is exceptional. Even the branding is woven in far more naturalistically: as Faf du Plessis took what would later be named the Herbalife Catch of the Match, the commentators seamlessly discussed what an active guy he must have been to take such a catch, perhaps even with a well-honed vitamin and supplement regime. Try doing that with Kettle Chips.
Of course over the years the IPL has spawned many imitators, from the Big Bash to the Hundred, the Caribbean Premier League to the Pakistan Super League, all of them essentially trying to replicate the irreplicable. The success of the IPL was not based in city franchises or primetime-friendly TV slots or razzmatazz, but the simple magnetism that binds a star Indian cricketer to their public. You could glimpse this during the opening game, when a late Gujurat wicket was greeted rapturously by the Ahmedabad crowd, not so much for what it was as what it meant next: the arrival of the Chennai No 8, Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
Dhoni is 41 now, and these days he has chiselled his game down to its very barest elements. He comes in right at the end, and rarely faces more than a few balls. Those few balls are usually the best television you will watch that day. There are fans who come not to follow a team, but simply to follow Dhoni. Against Lucknow on Monday, he strode in to face Mark Wood, smacked his first two balls into the crowd, and then was out off the third. Nothing wasted, nothing accidental.
In this country you still frequently hear debates about how the IPL can be somehow constrained or accommodated, how the global game of cricket can weatherproof itself against its effects. To which the only possible response is: just look at it. These are the debates that should probably have happened 14 years ago, while I was lying in bed watching Setanta Sports via an Acer laptop. Turn on the IPL now and you can see Visit Saudi and Qatar Airways hoardings plastered across a stadium named after Narendra Modi, while Dhoni thumps a pull shot into the screaming void. This, if you think about it, is probably what winning looks like.
