20 reasons to remember the 2009 IPL

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1 Bruno the police dog that held up play at the opening match at Newlands. Sachin Tendulkar was early in the process of grafting out a scratchy 59 when Bruno invaded the pitch. As many as 20 people attempted to catch the hound during an 11-minute break in play before he finally trotted off on his own terms.

2 The St George’s Park crowd. Surprisingly, it was the Port Elizabeth faithful who most embraced the IPL. Packed to the rafters for even most midweek games, St George’s Park went off the hook at every match. Led by the famous brass band in the cheap seats, it is possibly the only ground in the world where the crowd sing their way through every over.

3 The Super Over between the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Rajasthan Royals, after the tournament’s only tie, was awesome. Shane Warne gave the ball to his youngest bowler, Kamran Khan, and Chris Gayle smashed him for 15 runs off the over. In reply, Yusuf Pathan blasted 18 runs off four balls to give the Royals their first win.

4 The look on Kevin Pietersen’s face after umpire Simon Taufel gave him out LBW for a duck to Muralitharan. KP was fined for dissent after his reaction to this, correct, decision from the world’s best umpire.

5 AB de Villiers’ 100 off 51 balls for Delhi v Chennai in Durban, the first ton of the tournament. De Villiers ended up the third highest runscorer, averaging 51.66.

6 The anonymous (and probably fake) blogger, claiming to be one of the floundering Kolkata Knight Riders, who created havoc with his insults of the likes of ‘Lordie’ (Saurav Ganguly) and ‘Dildo’ (team owner Shah Rukh Khan).  

7 Suresh Raina’s century that never was. The scoreboard showed 100 runs next to Raina’s name when his team, the Rajasthan Royals, took on the Chennai Super Kings at Centurion. Raina celebrated the ‘hundred’ then went for a big shot off the next ball and was caught on the boundary. By the time Raina got back to the dug-out, the scoreboard had been edited to show 98 runs, as the scorers realised they had made a mistake.

8 Warne’s on-field beer drinking. Not long after having a cigarette in the nets in Durban, Shane Warne was offered and accepted a large swig of beer on the boundary during a match against the Royal Challengers at Centurion. It didn’t seem to hinder his bowling or captaincy as the Royals restricted the opposition to 105 all out then chased it down with five overs to spare.

9 Dirk Nannes keeping Glenn McGrath out of the Delhi side. With a maximum number of four foreign players allowed in each team, Virender Sehwag couldn’t find a space for McGrath in his side. Instead, McGrath wound up coaching the Dutch/Middlesex bowler, still a relative newcomer to cricket after his previous career as a World Cup skier.

10 Matthew Hayden’s non-stop run-feast. Forced out of the Australian team earlier this year, the Big Fish was back to his old bowler-bullying self at IPL 2009. Hayden held the Orange Cap, which is awarded to the leading run scorer, for almost the entire IPL season. He finished with 572 runs, thereby keeping the cap despite playing only 12 out of a possible 16 matches.

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11 Yuvraj Singh’s hat-trick in Durban. Claiming the wickets of Test batsmen, Robin Uthappa, Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher, the part time spinner took a hat-trick on the same ground where he hit Stuart Broad for six sixes in one over in 2007. Yuvraj then smacked 50 off 34 balls, but still ended on the losing side against Bangalore.

 

12 Rohit Sharma’s hat-trick at Centurion. Sharma, the Indian all-rounder and under-23 player of the tournament took a scintillating hat-trick that helped put an end to the campaign of Sachin Tendulkar’s Mumbai Indians.

13 Yuvraj Singh’s second hat-trick in two weeks. This time his efforts were enough to give an unlikely win to his Kings XI Punjab team. Punjab had posted only 134/7 but, thanks to captain Yuvraj, the team were able to defend it as the Deccan Chargers fell short by a single run.

14 Munaf Patel’s sensational over.  Munaf Patel took one wicket for one run in the final over for Rajasthan Royals to beat Mumbai Indians by two runs in Durban. Mumbai needed just four runs off the last over with four wickets in hand when Patel bowled an extraordinarily tight over that included two run outs. Pandemonium ensued. 

15 Charl Langeveldt proved he should have played in every game when he took three wickets for 15 runs in Durban. Kolkata Knight Riders coach, John Buchanan, preferred Ajit Agarkar and even Mashrafe Mortaza to South Africa’s best death bowler. Buchanan’s team lost almost every game while Langeveldt sat on the bench. When the South African was finally given a chance in the last match, v Rajasthan, he took a wicket with the first ball of a beautiful spell. 

16 Manish Pandey’s century. The unknown Pandey was an integral part of India’s success at the 2008 Under-19 World Cup. Three days before the final, Pandey hit an unbeaten 114 runs off 73 balls against the Deccan Chargers at Centurion. Pandey’s 48 off 35, at the Wanderers semi final versus the Chennai two days later, was every bit as good. Watch out for this guy

17 Winning captain Adam Gilchrist’s destruction of every opening bowler in the tournament. Gilly hadn’t really played any cricket since the last IPL but that didn’t stop him from cracking 174 runs in sixes and 216 runs in fours. Gilchrist came second on the Orange Cap table and was a major part of every one of his team’s wins, with the exception of the final, where he was clean bowled by Kumble for a duck in the first over. No-one who saw it will forget Gilchrist’s 85 off 35 balls in the Centurion semi-final against Delhi.

18 Anil Kumble’s excellent bowling and captaincy. Spare a thought for the losing captain who bowled like a master and did everything except win the IPL. Kumble took five wickets for five runs in the first game of the tournament to crush Rajasthan, the defending champions. And Kumble’s four wickets for 16 runs in the final was almost enough to win it.  

19 The fireworks. Lalit Modi went to town on his explosives expenditure. I have never seen such awesome fireworks in my life as I saw every day over the last six weeks. Domestic pets near the stadiums can now re-emerge from under the table.

20 Eddy Grant’s “Gimme Hope Joanna”. The IPL organisers could not have found a better headline act to perform at the closing ceremony concert than the reggae legend, Eddy Grant. The entire capacity crowd stayed behind and sang along loudly along to the words of the ant-apartheid hit as they waved neon fluorescent sticks and hundreds of lanterns sailed off into the cold Jo’burg night’s sky.

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‘I captained Adam Gilchrist in the Middlesex League’

In 1989, a teenage Adam Gilchrist ran rampant in London club cricket. His Richmond CC skipper, CHRIS GOLDIE, recalls a remarkable summer

’We’d built up quite a decent side at Richmond, anyway. We had a couple of boys who were playing or had played professionally: I’d just finished at Hampshire myself and we had Mike Roseberry, who played for us when he wasn’t playing for Middlesex; and then Graham Roope, who’d been an England Test batsman, lived round the corner and asked me if he could have some games too. 

We’d had a few Australians playing for us before but then, in the winter of 1988/89, I had a phone call from Michael Welch, president of Teddington CC. Michael was very friendly with the chief exec of New South Wales and with the Waugh family and the previous summer, he organised for Dean Waugh – Steve and Mark’s younger brother – to come over and play for us. Michael said the NSW Country Cricket Association were going to send a 17-year-old  called Adam Gilchrist over on a scholarship. This lad was a good player – he’d played for Australia under-17s – the only problem was that he was a keeper-batter. Well, I was a keeper-batter myself so, as club captain, I said Adam could keep in the Sunday team and, if he was a good enough batter, he could play on Saturday in the first team too. The deal was done. I had a letter from his dad, Stan, saying: “I think he’s going to be quite a good player, but then again I’m his dad” and all this sort of stuff.

Adam arrived on a Sunday morning on a cold grey day in April. They brought him up to the ground where we were playing at Isleworth and it looked like the poor lad didn’t quite know what he was getting into. He had this big black coat on; we had curry for tea and he seemed a bit bemused by the whole thing. But he immediately fitted in as a person: very polite, very respectful and everyone thought, ‘What a nice lad.’

We had our selection meeting on the Monday night: we had a cup game against the Met Police on the Wednesday – I couldn’t play because I had to work, so we said Adam could play in that. I rang from work on the Wednesday to see how we were getting on. They said: “We’re doing okay: we’re 220/0 and young Gilchrist just got his hundred.” On the Saturday, he went off to play for the 2s at Finchley – and he got another 100 not out. On the Sunday he got 100 against Wimbledon. And so it went on. By the end of May he’d got about 990 runs in around 13 games. 

One game that really showed he was something special was against Brondesbury: we had a weakened side and they had Dilip Doshi, who had been bowling slow-left-arm for India until about five years previously. I remember saying to Adam. “Don’t worry about him – you’re in good nick, we’ll all play around you…” And sure enough he got 100 – and that was the first real indication that he had something special about him. To take a century off this Test spinner… I mean, the bowling at the other end wasn’t all that but it was still a big challenge. By the end, he hit 15 centuries for us that summer. The BBC local news came down and did a piece on him.

Adam had tremendous concentration. He played with obvious confidence if not the same brutal aggression he showed later on. Could I have predicted that he would become one of the greats of the game? I wouldn’t have gone that far – but I would have put my mortgage on him playing first-class cricket and maybe Test cricket. I guess I wondered if he was good enough to go all the way as a keeper. He had a lot to learn in his keeping – he was slightly ungainly – but we worked a little bit on it and I still see him do things in internationals that date back to sessions we had together.

His older brother Dean was over here playing for Old Actonians, just over the river, and Adam would go and play for their Colts on midweek evenings. Obviously, he cleaned up. He played cricket on the vast majority of days he was in England. He must have scored more than 4000 runs that summer. Easily. He was living in the pavilion at Twickenham CC and the days he didn’t play, he would study for his Highers – the Aussie version of A-levels. Religiously during the week, he’d spend his time doing this homework and sending it off to be marked. 

Adam’s stayed in touch and comes to see us when he’s over: before the 2005 Ashes, he did a little Q & A for us in a local pub, where he said that, after he’d retired, he would definitely tour with us again at some point.

In the meantime, we have the Adam Gilchrist scholarship, through which Adam and Puma and other sponsors support a young Aussie cricketer to come and play for us every summer. Adam’s dad selects the youngster to come over; the only real condition is that the applicants need to come, like Adam, from a ‘country’ background.

Adam came to a game when he was over in 2004: it was the night we won the league. This little lad went up to him and said: “Is it true that Chris Goldie’s a better keeper than you?” And he was good enough to say: “Well… I suppose that was true at the time.” Although, fair play, I think he did go on to be slightly better than I was.