England T20 call-ups for Yardy, Lumb and Bopara

The ECB today named the final England men’s and women’s squads for the forthcoming ICC World Twenty20 to be held in the Caribbean from April 30.

The England men’s final squad of 15 players includes uncapped Hampshire batsman Michael Lumb and Somerset’s Craig Kieswetter while Ravi Bopara and Michael Yardy have been recalled to the national team.

The England women’s squad welcomes back Claire Taylor and Holly Colvin as they look to defend their ICC World Twenty20 crown.

Commenting on the England men’s squad, Geoff Miller, England National Selector, said: “We believe we’ve picked a balanced squad that can meet the needs of the Twenty20 format – aggressive batting with variation and strength in depth and various bowling options that accommodate the conditions and surfaces in the West Indies. Our fielding, which is such a vital aspect of limited overs cricket, has improved markedly and there’s no reason we can’t perform well in what will be a challenging global tournament.

“On the recent tour of Bangladesh Craig Kieswetter showed what he is capable of in international limited overs cricket and as a wicketkeeper at the top of the order he gives us options down the order. Craig has improved over time and his selection indicates real competition for places which is only healthy for the England team. Despite missing selection for this format of the game Matt Prior very much remains in the England set up and a part of our plans.

“Michael Lumb has consistently performed well in limited overs cricket for Hampshire and has also impressed during his time in the IPL and with the England Lions. As a powerful left-hander Michael adds aggression to our batting and has the ability to compliment the rest of the line-up.

“Michael Yardy has also performed at a consistently high level for his county, Sussex, in limited overs cricket and knows his game inside and out. Both Michael and Ravi Bopara have earned recalls to the England squad after going away and working hard on their cricket with excellent results.”

Commenting on the England women’s squad, Clare Connor , Head of England Women’s Cricket, said: “We believe we have selected a squad of players with the necessary skills to retain the ICC World Twenty20. Whilst this will be no easy feat given the strength of our group ( Australia , West Indies and South Africa ), the Twenty20 series win in India in February has prepared the squad well for the challenge.

“In order to make way for the return of Claire Taylor and Holly Colvin, who missed the India tour due to other commitments, the selectors have had to make some tough decisions. Young Academy graduates Heather Knight, Danielle Wyatt and Danielle Hazell all seized their opportunities in India and, as such, have retained their places in the squad.

“A couple of senior players have missed out on selection but the door remains open to them with a huge summer ahead against New Zealand in July. It is exactly this sort of competition for places that we are always striving for. We wish Charlotte Edwards and her squad every success in their bid to retain their ICC World Twenty20 champion status.”

England men’s ICC World T20 squad:

1. Paul Collingwood ( Durham , Captain)
2. James Anderson ( Lancashire )
3. Ravi Bopara (Essex)
4. Tim Bresnan ( Yorkshire )
5. Stuart Broad (Nottinghamshire)
6. Craig Kieswetter ( Somerset )
7. Michael Lumb (Hampshire)
8. Eoin Morgan (Middlesex)
9. Kevin Pietersen (Hampshire)
10. Ajmal Shahzad ( Yorkshire )
11. Ryan Sidebottom (Nottinghamshire)
12. Graeme Swann (Nottinghamshire)
13. James Tredwell ( Kent )
14. Luke Wright ( Sussex )
15. Michael Yardy ( Sussex )

England women’s ICC World T20 squad:

1. Charlotte Edwards ( Kent, Captain )
2. Katherine Brunt ( Yorkshire )
3. Holly Colvin ( Sussex )
4. Lydia Greenway ( Kent )
5. Jenny Gunn (Nottinghamshire)
6. Danielle Hazell ( Yorkshire )
7. Heather Knight (Berkshire)
8. Laura Marsh ( Sussex )
9. Beth Morgan (Middlesex)
10. Nicky Shaw (Surrey)
11. Anya Shrubsole ( Somerset )
12. Claire Taylor (Berkshire)
13. Sarah Taylor ( Sussex )
14. Danielle Wyatt (Staffordshire)

Best of Spin 6: the story of the Mongoose, cricket’s tiny new bat

First published in Spin magazine, July 2009

In a studio five minutes walk from London Bridge, the Australian cricketer Stuart Law is swishing a bat around and being filmed, by a video crew and two photographers. The bat Law is wielding appears to be crazily small – about two-thirds the size of a normal bat in fact. It does not look as if it might be something that a player like Law, who has played in World Cup finals and been a professional for the last 20 years, might ever contemplate using in a serious match.

In fact, he already has used a version of the bat, in a game for Derbyshire against Essex the previous week.

He scored 95 with it.

There have been no changes to the basic design of a cricket bat for over 200 years, until the development of this bat – the Mongoose. Over the course of the day, its inventor, a club cricketer and ex-advertising man called Marcus Codrington Fernandez, will be outlining his one-man mission to convert the cricket world to using smaller bats; very much smaller bats.

The MCC approved the Mongoose – six inches shorter in the blade than a standard bat – 12 months ago. Why wouldn’t they? While the rules on bats are strict and detailed – Ricky Ponting’s carbon-backed Kookaburras, for example, were shown the door back in 2006 –  the notion that a smaller hitting area might provide a player with any kind of advantage comes straight from left-field. The main principle of the bat laws are that the bat must not be wider than four-and-a-quarter inches and that both handle and blade must be made of wood.

The Mongoose complies.

Codrington Fernandez used the Mongoose himself through last season. He averaged 80 in club cricket when for the last 25 years he had, he says, always averaged 37. He says he took a lot of stick off opposition players when he walked to the middle with his tiny bat. But the stick tended to last only until he had played an attacking shot, until they had seen exactly how much more powerful the Mongoose was than the conventional bat.

At first glance, the whole story seems to make no sense at all. But it works like this: 1) batsmen hardly ever use the very top part of their bat; and never use it to score runs, only as a matter of last-ditch defence. 2) Taking the virtually useless wood from that very top section and moving it further down gives a meaty blade with very thick edges that feels at once like a weapon and, because of the longer handle, as light as, if not lighter, than a regular bat. 3) Having a longer handle gives this meatier little bat a lot of extra whip and bat speed through the ball increases dramatically.

This was the theory, cooked up by Codrington Fernandez after – as we shall learn – watching Geoffrey Boycott on youtube a little over a year ago.

Acting on a hunch, Codrington Fernandez – immensely charming, obsessed with cricket, the perfect front man – made a prototype, petitioned the MCC and asked Imperial College London to test his theories. Dr Anthony Bull’s team at Imperial’s department of biomechanical engineering, which specialises in testing sports equipment, came back with encouraging results: yes, the prototype did have a bigger sweet spot than normal bats; it could achieve bat-speeds up to 20 per cent higher from the same effort from the batsman.

The next part of his mission was to take the science and the genius idea and turn it into a commercial proposition by convincing the world of cricket that he had something.

Codrington Fernandez spent the winter months taking the bat round the world showing it to people, asking professionals what they made of it. The bat – built for players who need to attack every ball – seemed ideal for Twenty20. He showed it, informally, to Kevin Pietersen; Andrew Flintoff; Dimitri Mascarenhas; Yuvraj Singh; later, it was shown around at net sessions at Surrey and Middlesex and Somerset. Players were intrigued. Some were left unconvinced, concerned they would feel naked against pace bowlers on bouncy pitches. Others were more receptive, but already contracted to big manufacturers; one big-name Indian player was apparently keen to use it – but also keen to get $1.5m a year in return for doing so.

That was not an option.

In the end, the fit came down to two of the world’s top one-day players: Stuart Law and Lou Vincent, as well as England women’s players Ebony Rainford-Brent and Laura Marsh. (Codrington Fernandez is convinced the Mongoose could revolutionise the women’s game.)

Which is how we got here. London Bridge. May 14, 2009.

SPIN When did you first think of this idea?

Marcus Codrington Fernandez The inspiration was Geoff Boycott. I was watching him bat on youtube – Number of hits: 3 and you know the other two were Geoff Boycott. He was always a great hero of mine. It was noticeable that he wasn’t trying to hit the ball hard: he was trying to stay in. And his bat seemed the right tool for the job. And that’s what people had been trying to do throughout the 20th century: stay in and accumulate runs.

Then I watched the IPL – this was last year – and it struck me that the batsman’s job now has changed: it is no longer about staying in but about hitting the ball harder and trying to score off a many balls as possible. And yet they were using the same tool as Boycott had, to do a completely different job. I thought cricket had fundamentally changed but the equipment hadn’t. It didn’t seem to make sense.

As I kid, I used to go to Hunts County and get bats made, so I knew the process. Which is very simple. You get two bits of wood, conjoin them and cut them up. And once you know that, you can start thinking of ways of adapting that process. If I hadn’t had that basic knowledge of the principles of making bats I don’t think this would have happened at all.

Why so much shorter – wouldn’t something less radical have been easier to sell?

MCF We know that, at this size, you increase bat speed by between 11 and 20 per cent which makes an enormous difference. The difficulty was getting the splice out of the blade – if you have a shorter blade with a splice in it, you’re making a greater percentage of the area of the bat redundant; you can only defend with the part of the bat with the splice, not score runs. So we spent a good few months with Hunts County developing prototypes where we eventually worked out how to take the splice out of the blade. And it went from being a curious idea into being a commercial possibility.

You have been a decent cricketer yourself, haven’t you?

MCF I had trials with Somerset and Northants when I was 16 or 17 and didn’t get offered anything. But to be honest I was never good enough or committed enough by any means. I was playing for Bedfordshire at that time. I played until I was 16 or 17, I suppose…

Stuart, tell us about the first time you met Marcus and saw the Mongoose…

Stuart Law It was in the showers in the away dressing room at Taunton. Paul Prichard from the PCA – who had been approached by Marcus for help – rang me and said, ‘Don’t dismiss this guy straight away’ because some of the pros had taken one look at it and said, ‘Get that out of here.’ But I’m open-minded. Marcus showed me and I was like, ‘Okay, that’s different.’ Then he explained the reasoning behind it – and to be honest picking it up and having it in my hands showed me what I needed to know: it did increase bat-speed without my changing my stroke or putting in extra effort.

I took it in the indoor school and got Andy Brown, the Derbyshire assistant coach, to throw me a few and the second one nearly took his head off!

I thought, ‘Okay this is serious’.

I’ve never been a power hitter. I’ve always been a timer of the ball. But if anything can help your bat-speed without you losing your shape; if you can increase your power not by doing anything different but by using something different. You don’t have to lift more weights to hit the ball harder – it’s the Holy Grail of increasing bat speed through the ball.

Don’t you have any concerns without having a top to the bat?

MCF There’s a very small percentage of balls that hit the very top of the bat. It’s counter intuitive. When you look at it, it doesn’t look like it’s going to work, even though there’s logic behind it and there’s a rational process behind it that seems to make sense. You still have to get your head round playing with it. Once you play with it yourself then you get convinced quite quickly. When you see Stuart play in the nets with it, he can still play a straight bat back foot defensive shot in the way cricketers always have done.

SL [Miming a very correct back-foot defensive shot]. But if you’re playing Twenty20 cricket, which is where this is targeted and you’re playing that shot, then you’re Geoffrey Boycott. Look, I was a bit sceptical about what you do if the ball bounces above your waist. But you don’t use the very top of the bat to defend like that, in any case. And in Twenty20 you’re not looking to defend you’re looking to attack.

People will see this as a gimmick – until they use it and feel the difference it creates. If you look at a lot of the slower pitches around the world, places like the sub-continent where the ball doesn’t really bounce above waist high, the guys over there increase their bat speed with massive bats… well, if MS Dhoni used this instead, he’d double it his bat-speed.

How has it gone down at Derby?

SL You get the old traditionalists like the coaching staff who aren’t too sure. Then the young kids who are raving about it. The guys who’ve actually hit with it, say ‘It works’. They know where it’s coming from.

There are different scenarios: if it’s the last five overs of a 50-over game or a batting powerplay and they’re bowling yorkers, this is the perfect bat. Perfect for facing spin. And if you’re in a 50-over game and there’s been a no-ball, and you’ve got a free hit… you can have the 12th man bring it on.

At this point, Law hadn’t used the short-short version of the bat – the MMI 3 – in a match. but he had used a slightly more conventional version – the COR 3. The principle of this bigger bat is the same – a shorter blade, but only by an inch or so – and it has the same advantages over a conventional bat, just on a less extreme scale.

SL You look at them and you’d think they weight about 5lb – but they weight about 2 lb ten. The edges on them are seriously big. Against Northants I was playing cut shots off the toe of the bat and they were speeding away for four. If you just get good contact of the ball on any part of the bat – and it really goes.

Ten days later, Law brings out the Mongoose MMI in Derbyshire’s first Twenty20 game of the season. He is well set on 32 at the time and proceeds to hit 10 more runs off six balls – including a massive, but effortless, six over mid-wicket – before he is run out.

Afterwards, Codrington Fernandez says that he had been more nervous than he
had ever been in his life, even on his
wedding day. He spends the next day trying to finalise a deal for a player to use one in the ICC World Twenty20.

The Mongoose is out there.

IPL In Full Swing

We are nine days into the IPL and so far it has not disappointed. The tournament has boasted close games, full stadiums, record television audiences.

Lalit Modi would have licked his lips when the first three matches of this tournament were last-ball thrillers. The organisers couldn’t have asked for any better way to get the massive ball rolling. There is nothing easy about keeping the world interested in every game when there are so many games but it feels like Modi and his team are on top of things.

But the length of this tournament is a little testing. Especially considering it is just too bloody hot to play cricket at this time of year. 60 matches in 45 days is more cricket than even nutters like me can handle. But so far so good as the public lap up the show. One may have predicted that the novelty may have worn off but IPL 3 is generating television audiences that are up 35% on IPL1.

Today the announcement was made that the two successful bidders for additional IPL franchisers are Sahara and Rendezvous Sports World. They will be based in Pune (a two hour drive from Mumbai) and Kochi (the capital of Kerala – God‘s country). The two successful bids for teams were accepted at prices in excess of 300 million dollars each and take the number of teams in the league from eight to ten.

I have just had a chat with some of  the tournament organisers and it seems most likely that next year’s tournament will follow the same format – home and away round robins to establish semi-finalists who then play either in the final or the third place playoff. With eight teams that gives 60 matches. With ten teams it gives 94 matches!

25% more teams gives over 50% more matches. And that probably means over 50% more advertising revenue. Only time will tell whether the BCCI kill the goose that laid the golden egg but for now it is hard to deal with the realisation that this long tournament will consist of 94 matches! Blimey that’s a lot of Twenty20.

Next year the player talent pool will be diluted, fans will care less about each and every game and the BCCI will make more money. There will also be even more injuries. But the show will go on. This season the BCCI expects to make a profit of 750 crore rupees, 35% more than last year. It’s a profit of close on 200 million dollars after the franchises have taken their shares of the revenues. But it’s really much more than that because the present value of future income streams to the IPL brand is immeasurable. And you can safely expect it to grow.

Something I have noticed is that crowds have become increasingly partisan. Yes, spectators are up for a good show but they seem to care more and more about their home side. This is especially true in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata where full seas of red, blue, yellow and purple shirts go ballistic in the stands. It has taken a couple of years but fans are now supporting their teams and not just their favourite players.

But I can’t help but assume that the player re-auction that will take place before IPL 4 will undo so much of the fan loyalty that has taken three years to build. Imagine Manchester United and Chelsea giving up all their players and going to auction top see who will play for them for the next three years. The notion is ridiculous but any other method will be deemed unfair to the two new franchises. And they have paid big dollar for the privilege.

Best of SPIN 5: MCC chief exec Keith Bradshaw goes on the record

First published in SPIN magazine, February 2010 issue

When Keith Bradshaw was announced as the new secretary of the MCC in 2006, it caused a bit of a stir. Bradshaw, after all, was Australian and, at 42, half a generation younger than most of his predecessors. What was he doing as the public face of one of England’s most conservative institutions? Now we know: Bradshaw is on his way to turning the MCC – previously a byword for staunch tradition – into a forward-thinking body, turning out maverick proposals – pink balls, floodlight Tests, franchise T20 events – on a regular  and unprecedented basis.

Formally, cricket’s power has moved East, away from the private members club in St Johns Wood. The ICC, once administered by MCC, is now based in Dubai. But the MCC has looked to re-assert its position at cricket’s top table since Bradshaw took over. Not just in the world game, but within England. Bradshaw’s blueprint for a nine-team franchise-based English Twenty20 tournament was voted down by county chairmen in 2008, as English cricket explored its post-IPL options.

But the independent thinking just kept coming: at the end of 2009, the MCC was in the papers for funding Middlesex’s T20 signing of Adam Gilchrist and Sachin Tendulkar; there were reports, unconfirmed, that MCC’s views on TV rights at the ‘Crown Jewels’ enquiry had opposed the ECB’s;  then there was the talk of playing the traditional MCC-v-champion county curtain-raiser under floodlights in Dubai (true) and reports that Bradshaw was considering renaming Lord’s after a sponsor (absolutely not, he says – though there will be residential blocks at the Nursery End and an underground Academy).

Meanwhile, the MCC’s all-star, self-funded World Cricket Committee was urging the ICC to consider a formal World Test Championship in a bid to re-invigorate the five-day game.

Things are changing in St John’s Wood. But many of the details an motivations have, until now, been misreported. In a full and wide-ranging interview, Keith Bradshaw helped clear up exactly where the MCC – and more importantly, cricket as a whole, is heading in the new decade.

SPIN: If we’d interviewed the secretary of the MCC five years ago, we’d have talked about the past. Today, we’re talking about the future. Is that change down to you personally or to changes in MCC as a whole?

Keith Bradshaw: I think it’s a combination.I think history and tradition is very important and we need to preserve that. It’s one of our strengths. So it’s not about change for change’s sake. I think we can change our image without changing our values. The game is changing and I think as a club we need to embrace that change and in some instances lead it – but at the same time respect our history and traditions.

I think we are probably the only organisation in the world of cricket that is free from conflict… we’re almost the conscience of the game and that’s a really important role.

Was all this innovation a part  of your brief when you took over as CEO?

When I did my interview they asked me to do a presentation on my objectives for the first 12 months – I said I didn’t have any, that I wanted to go in and listen and understand and see what issues the MCC was facing and then decide in which direction we should head.

I felt the MCC’s image – in terms of it being crusty or stuffy – I felt it was unfair to a degree. It was probably an impression I had had too, but when I arrived I found that the members were passionate about their cricket, there were a lot of people who were very forward-thinking and could see that the club had to keep pace with the times. For me, it was important to be very open and transparent. There were things we needed to change…. I think Lord’s as a destination, as the home of cricket, is here for everybody.

You compare MCC to the brand of the All England Club and Wimbledon. Is there no conflict between this kind of talk and the members with more traditional views?

I think they can work together. The brand isn’t just about the logo it’s about the way we do things and the way people are treated when they come to the ground.

You may argue that cricketing bodies at the moment are very dependent on broadcasting revenue – part of my challenge is to make sure we diversify. I’m not looking to plaster an MCC logo on every product in the high street… It needs to be appropriate. It’s the same with our sponsors. It’s about the right partners and the right merchandise. One of the concepts we’re looking at is our cricket academies. We’re rebranding the Lord’s indoor school next year as a cricket academy and we think there’s the potential to take MCC cricket academies around the world.

Let’s talk about hosting the Durham-MCC game in Abu Dhabi this season. What’s the reason behind that – is it purely financial?

No, it’s not financial. We received notification of the date of the champion county game from the ECB – 3 April –  and we happened to be in Abu Dhabi at the time. We said, ‘Gee, that’s early’ and last year we lost a lot of play to rain anyway. And we’d just finished our World Cricket Committee meeting where we’d been discussing pink balls and day-night Tests. We’re not saying every Test should be day-night but we were saying that Test cricket needs to be invigorated – not so much in London or in England but elsewhere – and how could we do that? And one of the ideas was day-night Test cricket. And for that you need to get a ball that works – and we think the pink ball is worthy of a trial.

We tried to get a trial at the end of last season but we couldn’t get a county match to stage one so here was an opportunity to have a four-day match with a pink ball in harsher conditions than early season at Lord’s – on a harder pitch, the ball will scuff more. So we thought let’s do it under lights as well. We’re trying to make a contribution to the world game and until this trial happens it won’t progresss. So we thought that for the greater good, for this year, we should go ahead with the trial.

We don’t see it as long-term. We will play more matches in Abu Dhabi but in terms of the traditional season opener, this – Lord’s – is where it should be. This is a one-off for the good of the game. There may not be the need for another trial in any case….

But you do have a long-term arrangement with Abu Dhabi…

We’ve signed a partnership with them.

So it could be a site for one of your academies?

Correct – and we’ll also send our young cricketers out there for pre-season and we have a reciprocal arrangement for members of both clubs and we have usage of their grounds. So it’s mutually beneficial…

It’s been reported that the MCC’s submission to the government’s ‘Crown Jewels’ sport-on-TV committee opposed the ECB line. Is that right?

I don’t think it was significantly different to be honest, though I know it’s been reported that way. We made a few points – we talked about the number of packages that go out to tender from the ECB: was that the right set of packages? Could some modifications be made? I think there was a feeling from our members that they would like to see some Test cricket on terrestrial television. We talked about that but the over-arching message is that it’s not terrestrial at any cost. I think that’s been lost in some of the coverage.

So if you were asked, ‘Should the Lord’s Ashes Test be shown live and in full on terrestrial television’… what would you say?

The response would be… it’s not that simple. You’d have to say, ‘What are the implications for the game?’

But the MCC would be keener to have cricket on terrestrial TV than the ECB?

I think the honest answer to that is that we would be keen to have cricket on terrestrial television if it could be shown that it wasn’t to the detriment of the game in England.

This all plays into the wider issue that Lord’s is not guaranteed a Test match every year from the ECB…

When I first arrived I was staggered to hear that: Lord’s is an icon, it’s a national treasure, why would you not have two Tests here? It seemed preposterous to me that you would shift a Test to another ground. It would be like moving Wimbledon to Eastbourne.

So you are competing on a level playing field with the Rose Bowl and Cardiff and all the newer international venues?

Yes, we all bid in a competitive closed tender situation and tenders are allocated based on the quality of the submissions the grounds make and there’s a scorecard which takes into account 1) how much you are prepared to bid, but also hospitality, geography – so being close to the Oval means that geographic spread counts against us all the time….

The Oval has a long-term agreement – it’s guaranteed Tests every year. That must be grieving for Lord’s…

Well, we see a long -term staging agreement of our own as vitally important for us – for the development of the ground.

You’re hosting one of the Pakistan-Australia Tests this summer – you were, personally, a prime mover for neutral venue Tests even before they became ‘essential’, weren’t you?

I always said whatever we can do to promote Test cricket as a  whole we should be doing and neutral Tests was one of those things. We bid fairly aggressively to get this year’s Test. We saw it as a good thing to assist Pakistan cricket, because Pakistan are not able to play at home at the moment. Commercially, it might not be a great success, given that it starts on a Tuesday and other factors count against it, but we saw it as more important to do whatever we could to have it next year – so we have three Tests here this year.

Will Pakistan be playing here again after this summer?

Yes, to me it seems logical – although there’s been no talks – but if India are playing here in 2011 and Pakistan are looking to play neutral Tests, I would hope there’d be an India-Pakistan Test here next year.

How close have you come to hosting other big neutral-venue games before?

We hosted the Rajasthan Royals [British Asian Trust] game here last summer. It wasn’t about profitability. We made a contribution, we managed to get 22,000 people into the ground with just three weeks for marketing and that proved to us that there is a future for those sort of matches. It was a Monday evening, we bought some Bollywood entertainment in, trying to make it an event. And next summer, we have four Thursday-night Twenty20s here and we want to make that the thing to do on a Thursday night – come to Lords and watch Twenty20 cricket.

It’s about creating an experience that people want. So for Test cricket, we’re not looking to have horns and fancy dress or music. If you want that you can go somewhere else; that’s almost a unique selling point for us. But Twenty20 is a completely separate beast – we want to create the ultimate experience for people to come and watch it. It’s not about sitting down and eating your sandwiches. It’s poles-apart experiences – but we feel we need to embrace both and respect both.

How close has Lord’s come to hosting an actual IPL game?

We’ve had a lot of interest from IPL teams. We’re certainly keen to do it… and I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see IPL matches here in the future. It’s a case of wanting to respect the ECB and their role. It’s a case of working together to bring the IPL here without damaging the local product. But it’s going to happen, no matter what.

Eighteen months ago, myself and [Surrey chairman] David Stewart put forward our proposal to the ECB for a franchise-based Twenty20 competition – one of the arguments for that was that it would compete financially and in terms of attracting the world’s elite players on a par with the IPL.

I have great admiration for the IPL. But you do need competition in any environment and we thought that a nine-team franchise competition would pay the players the same sort of money as the IPL and create a lot of interest here. So, for me, the IPL now has no competition and we’re going to see it continue to grow…

Your new alliance with Middlesex – signing Adam Gilchrist and possibly Sachin Tendulkar for the  T20 – seems almost unilaterally trying to go down that franchise-style route…

Well, we’re moving closer to it. We have a great relationship  with Middlesex and I guess we’ve just become closer and closer over the years. So, for 2010, we sat down and said Middlesex are playing these games at Lord’s – how can we fill the ground? We said okay – we need to have the best players in the world playing.

Is it a partnership in kind, is money changing hands, or can’t you say?

I’m happy to say – we have a profit-sharing arrangement whereby Middlesex get the biggest share. But I guess when we’re talking about paying costs for Tendulkar and Gilchrist, that comes out of a pot….

So you’re underwriting the project…

Yes, effectively that’s how it works.

Is that as far as the deal goes?

Erm… I think there’s the potential to do more with Middlesex though at the moment there’s no plans to take it further.

Does English cricket need 18 counties?

The thing that was very disappointing to David and I was that our Twenty20 nine-team document was leaked to the press. It was an internal discussion document. For instance, the nine teams would each see two counties getting equity and profit share. The way that was then portrayed in the press spooked a lot of counties who felt it would mean they went out of business. The message didn’t get through.

The reality is that the standard of an 18-team competition isn’t going to be as great  as if you have a reduced number playing. Then again,the flip side is the history and the tradition – its not all about finances. I’m not someone that’s advocating fewer counties – let’s put it that way.

But if you were in charge of T20 in England…

I would certainly promote a nine-team franchise competition because I thought that was the way to go and it probably still is. But I’m a big believer of ‘You are where you are.’ Which is why we’re trying to get Gilchrist and Tendulkar. And I hear now that Warney may be coming to a county which – if it’s true – is terrific because it’s rasing the bar.

With the ICC moving to Dubai in 2005, was there a feeling that MCC was becoming a secondary organisation? You’ve certainly increased your ‘profile’ again in the last year or so…

I’m pleased to hear that because I think it’s important we do have a profile. We won’t always be popular for the things we say but the game is moving so quickly I think we have a contribution to make. As an independent voice and as a conscience, we need to make sure we are heard.

And we are the guardians of the laws of the game – that’s a very understated role. For us it’s about balancing the contest between bat and ball: if bats go too far does it change the nature of the game?

Like golf’s graphite shafts and titanium heads – if technology reduces the gap between the elite player and the club player, is that good for the game? In a lot of instances, it’s not.

The MCC World Cricket Committee – is that just the MCC putting itself forward? It’s not formally commissioned by ICC…

It was the brainchild of [former England captain and BBC commentator] Tony Lewis. He felt that world cricket could do with a body of the good and the great. I sit in the meetings and hear those guys talk – Steve Waugh , Barry Richards, Mike Brearley, Geoffrey Boycott, Shaun Pollock… They are there to advise us. It’s funded by us entirely; they make recommendations to us, give us a direction on where they think research should be done – pink balls are high on the list.

We were looking to see what we could
do to promote Test cricket. And the idea
of a World Test Championship came out
of that – there was a phenomenal response in the research on that. People said it
would definitely make a difference to their inerest in Test cricket.

But we just provide research and hopefully the ICC take it into consideration.

But is Test cricket commercially viable beyond the top four or five teams?

Well, that’s the challenge. I think we’re seeing different audiences. Twenty20 has brought a new audience to the game – women, children. People who didn’t realise cricket was so much fun. Our challenge then is to get that group of people interested in Test cricket. I think there’s things we can do around Tests in terms of the experience they have when they’re in the ground.

When you tell the ECB you’re putting down 100s of millions to improve Lord’s, it must be disappointing that they don’t bite your hand off for a long-term staging agreement?
It is a process that’s taking probably longer than I expected. The reality is that a lot of the developments here have been paid for by MCC – the magnificent draining system, the floodlights. We don’t get any grant money for those things – which other grounds do get. Am I disappointed? Well, I’ll be very disappointed if they don’t agree to a long-term staging agreement. We’ve had discussions over the last few months and so far they’ve been positive, so we’re hopeful.

World cricket used to be run from this office; now it’s run from Lalit Modi’s office. How do you read that situation?

Well, once again, we are where we are. It’s important to have good relationships. We have an extremely good relationship with India and India has a great passion for and respect for Lord’s. Our relationships since I’ve been here have been nothing less than fruitful, energising and exciting – so it’s a case of accepting the reality and moving with it.

Lalit Modi: how we made the IPL happen

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Lalit Modi, chairman of the IPL, and Andrew Wildblood, Senior Vice President of IMG, the sports management company that helped make the IPL happen, sat down in Johannesburg with SPIN’s Nick Sadleir.

Lalit, you seem to have been at almost every IPL game this year…

Lalit Modi If there are two games on the same day in different cities, I leave the one game 20 minutes before it ends and I get to the other one twenty minutes after it starts.

Andrew Wildblood Lalit doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of commercial travel. 

There must have been plenty of unknowns, shifting venue at such short notice…

LM Everyone told me it would be impossible. They said I was wasting time and money. I said, ‘Well, we are going to do this’. 

AW Lalit called me at five in the morning one day and asked what the hell I was doing sleeping when there was work to be done. He said that the IPL couldn’t happen in India. I told him if we could do it in India, then we could do it anywhere! 

He told me to meet him in Johannesburg the next day. So he came in his plane and I came down on a BA (flight).

LM We landed here, met the agencies, got Etienne de Villiers [until recently the head of the ATP tour] and Francios Pienaar [Saffer rugby legend, still very influential in SA sport and business] on the case. Etienne and Francois have been with me every single day for over two months – they moved out of their houses and into my hotel and have come with me everywhere.

You spent a lot of money advertising in SA…

AW Yes, Lalit uttered the immortal words – “I don’t want share of voice, I want all of voice.”

To pretty much sell out 59 games during the South African rugby season is good going….

LM The advertising agency gave us a budget of $3.5m. They said that was what they thought was appropriate and that it was probably the biggest advertising expenditure by any brand at any one particular time. Of course they expected us to cut it because all clients cut the budget. So I told them to multiply it by five. They told me I was wasting money on trying to fill the stadiums. I told them they should worry about the campaign and I will worry about filling the stadiums.

Andrew, when were you first involved in the business side of cricket? 

AW In 1989, when satellite broadcasters were first finding their feet.  I come from a generation whose only live football match in a year was the FA Cup final. In those days, sports revenues were driven by gate. The concern was that if you put everything on TV then you would diminish the value of the ticket revenues. We at IMG started to realise that the value could actually be in the television and not in the gate.

In 1990 England were touring the West Indies and the West Indies cricket board came to see us and said, “We are the most successful cricket team in the world, yet we are bust. What can we do?” When we told them that they could put this series on television they said they had approached the BBC who had said it was impossible – because the logistics of getting a production crew between the islands was too expensive. We said we could do it, sold the rights to Sky, and every ball was broadcast live. 

So the IPL is not the first time you have turned cricket on its head…

AW I then went to India where a similar situation existed because their television infrastructure was not suitable to creating a level of coverage that was consumable internationally. They didn’t have the equipment or the people to do it at that time. So we took a huge quantum leap. But even in 1990 our broadcast in the West Indies was only filmed by seven cameras. Here we have at least 36 cameras in each game.

Throughout the 1990s we covered almost all the international cricket in the West Indies, India and Pakistan. We organised the Sahara Cup in Canada and the World Cup in Pakistan…

Has IPL been hurt by the global recession?

LM I would have said it is pretty recession proof.

AW I think a combination of uncertainty in world economics, Indian elections and the move to South Africa meant that we did not sign two other official partners. We had had some good conversations going on that started to die when the uncertainty came in as to whether this year’s event would happen or not.

What this guy (Modi) does unbelievably well, is to not let anything get in his way. One thing I have had to learn about Lalit is that differences in opinion are nothing personal – they are just for that moment. We get things done, move on and are then friends again. Without that energy, drive and commitment, and without the backup of IMG, then this wouldn’t happen.

LM I have the vision and I know what I want. And when it comes to implementing that, these guys (IMG) are the very best.

So, IMG runs the show?

LM Yes, they run the show.

How has the IPL transformed Indian cricket?

 

AW We realised that in order for the tournament to be respectable then we had to do something that benefited Indian cricket. So we implemented a minimum number of under-23 players, and a maximum number of foreign players, in each side. There must be at least seven Indian players in each team. That makes at least 56 Indians who otherwise would not be exposed to international cricket. 

So it is unlikely that we will see the cap on international players increased from four, as called for by Kolkata’s John Buchanan?

LM No no, it’s not going up, it’s not going up!

AW People bully him about it all the time.

LM It’s not going up, it’s not going up! Not while I’m the commissioner. They can remove me and take it up, if they like.

It seems a lot of money is wasted on international stars that can’t get a game.

LM It is not wasted. Their experience counts for a lot. Look at Glenn McGrath sitting on the bench and giving pointers to Dirk Nannes…

AW The irony of it is that McGrath is coaching the guy who is keeping him out of the team! [Laughs]

What do you say to people who accuse you and T20 of killing off the old game?

LM If you do a survey around the stadium at an IPL match, you will find many people who have never watched a match before. They are getting a taste for the game, and many of them will graduate to Test cricket. They will then watch their stars performing in every version of the game. We are only increasing the base. The base is small and is quickly becoming bigger. Twenty20 is going tohave compounding effect on all parts of cricket.

Lalit, did you know that there was such a large and cricket-crazy Indian population in South Africa before this tournament?

LM No… But we do now! 

Is it true that a senior television person in India told you that he had little interest in screening Test matches?

AW Yes, Kunal Dasgupta (then CEO Multi Screen Media, Sony) told me that and it was then that I realised that something had to be done about Test match cricket, to shake it up. But no one has ever done anything about it except the Australians, who took it from a 2,5 runs per over to a 4 runs per over game. That made it a lot more exciting and greatly increased the chance of getting a result.

Would you support night Test matches?

AW Funnily enough no – I think that would fundamentally change the brand. What I would support is: four day Tests with 100 eight ball overs a day, massively punitive fines if you don’t deliver your overs. There is a lot of stuff you can do without messing with the fundamentals of the game. 

If you have eight-ball overs the amount of time you save is huge. An over is only six balls long because that is half a dozen. Don Bradman was a huge advocate of eight ball overs and who are we to argue with him?

Ali Bacher told me the other day that twenty five years ago he received a five page document from Bradman on why he supported eight ball overs and Bacher hugely regrets throwing it away.

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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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World’s top cricketers pick up tiny new bat

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News that some of the world’s top cricketers are considering using a bat that is 33 per cent smaller (yes: 33 per cent smaller) than the standard will be filtering onto the wires today.

I first heard about the Mongoose back in February when I met its inventor Marcus Codrington Fernandez. I’ve been following his progress ever since as he looks to persuade the world to use a bat that’s effectively six inches ‘too short’. We have a four-page feature on his mission in the July issue of SPIN, coming out on June 5.

The theory is this: 1) batsmen hardly ever use the very top part of their bat – and certainly not to play attacking shots and score runs with. 2) If you take all that ‘wasted’ wood from the top part of the bat, you can use it further down in the blade, making the (shorter) blade as thick as a brick and more powerful. 3) In having a longer handle, the blade has more ‘whip’. Though the bat is more powerful, it is the same overall weight as a conventional bat – but in effect feels lighter, because the longer handle offers greater leverage.

Codrington Fernandez and his partners at Hunts County bats have also devised a way to not have the splice within the blade – so the blade of the Mongoose is pure hitting area, pure sweet spot. Tests at Imperial College have shown all this, apparently, to be true. 

Reaction within the game – as Codrington Fernandez has trawled the off-season county grounds showing his wares to players – has been generally positive, despite pockets of scorn. Pietersen, Flintoff, Mascarenhas and Yuvraj Singh have all seen it, as have representatives of at least one major IPL team.

Bat deals are complicated (and expensive) yet Codrington Fernandez has two of the world’s top one-day players on board for his launch at Lord’s this morning, namely Stuart Law and Lou Vincent, as well as the England women players Laura Marsh and Ebony Rainford-Brent. (He thinks the bat could revolutionise the women’s game.)

Law is already using a version of the Mongoose in one-day games for Derbyshire – not quite an extreme a version as the headline product, it’s true, but still a bat with a blade that is an inch shorter than usual, and no splice within the blade. He hit 95 with it against Essex the other week.

“People will see this as a gimmick – until they actually use it and feel the difference it creates,” Law told me last week. “If you look at a lot of the slower pitches around the world, places like the sub-continent where the ball doesn’t really bounce above waist high. The guys over there, like MS Dhoni, increase their bat speed with massive heavy bats. Well, this is going to double it.”

The bat has been approved by the MCC and has its official launch at Lord’s this morning.

It is understood Codrington Fernandez is in advanced stages of talks with a player to use it in the men’s ICC World Twenty20 tournament. Law, meanwhile, has committed to using it in at least some part of his innings against Durham in the Twenty20 Cup on Tuesday.

Despite the surge of publicity – with an appearance on BBC Breakfast News and the Today programme – Mongoose is a cottage industry and is not geared up with thousands of bats in stock. Rather, initially, each order will be custom-made which, at a price of £159, is a deal that compares favourably with other top-of-the-range bats.

We’ll have a full feature on the development of the Mongoose and Marcus Codrington Fernandez’s mission in the next issue of SPIN.

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Yuvraj Singh, new balls and waking up Daniel Vettori: my latest week at the IPL

Last Thursday at Supersport Park, Centurion, something most unusual happened. Yuvraj Singh hit the biggest six of the tournament and in doing so, lost the match for his team. In a rain reduced match against the Chennai Super Kings, the Punjab Kings XI were chasing 185 runs in 18 overs, a daunting 10.3 runs per over. After a couple of wickets and a slow start, the asking rate shot up to 13 runs per over.

And then the fireworks began. Simon Katich hit three consecutive sixes before holing out on the boundary. Yuvraj Singh was joined by Mahela Jayawardene at the crease and their partnership quickly mushroomed as they continued to keep up with the intimidating asking rate. But when Yuvraj hit the monster of all sixes, measuring 119 metres, he lost the slippery wet ball that was coming so readily onto the bat and over the boundary.

The replacement dry ball allowed Chennai captain, MS Dhoni, to put spinners Muralitharan and Suresh Raina on for a few economical overs, thereby winning the game. As in any other form of cricket, the prevailing conditions are never in one’s control.

As Shilpa Shetty, the Bollywood megastar and co-owner of the Rajasthan Royals outfit said in Cape Town at the start of the IPL, “It is the unpredictability of cricket that makes it the best game there is.”

East London, nicknamed “slummies” for obvious reasons, is a coastal city in the Eastern Cape. I went to boarding school 100 miles away in the far smaller town of Grahamstown. Bunking out to the big lights of East London ten years ago offered such great excitement and I hadn’t been back to “slummies” since those exciting weekends away from school, where I remember seeing such fantastic things as indoor laser games for the first time.

And so I decided to visit East London last Friday for an IPL cricket match. On arrival I couldn’t help realise what a small and sleepy town it really is. Not much happens in EL and when it does, it happens slowly. The Xhosas, who make up most of the Eastern Cape population, are a very laid-back people and schedules run on the quintessential African time.

There are no taxis at the airport and the airport to hotel shuttle minibus stopped seven times during an hour and a half journey before dropping me at my hotel, just 15 miles from the airport. To their credit, Neil Mckenzie and Ramiz Raja, didn’t complain once as our driver stopped to run errands and wave at his girlfriends. One of five Wisden cricketers of the year in 2008, Mckenzie, helped a wheel-chaired lady in and out of the minibus and then carried her grandson’s bag to the foyer of their hotel. Mckenzie, who is commentating on the IPL, hadn’t been recognised by the couple, he’s just a great guy.

I had a few hours to kill before watching the Delhi Daredevils thrash the Mumbai Indians so I enjoyed a delicious fillet steak and a pint of castle draught at the Blue Lagoon hotel deck. I shared the deck with a pair of dassies (rock rabbits), who moved slower than the Xhosas as they soaked up the sun. I was contemplating the fact that this obscure animal’s closest living relative is the elephant when a charming Xhosa brought me my bill.

The total damage was R49, roughly a third of the price of the equivalent meal in a Johannesburg or Cape Town hotel. No wonder Lalit Modi and the BCCI chose cities like East London over the original London town when the Indian government decided it would be unable to provide the appropriate levels of security for the tournament.

The cricket ground, Buffalo Park, is only 150 yards from the sea, without a stand in between, and boasts the largest grass bank I have ever seen. Stretching hundreds of yards up a hill at an awkward angle, the bank affords spectators an awful long range view from which to watch the cricket as the offshore wind blows their picnics away. I guess the locals don’t know any better.

Not that many aeroplanes come and go from East London and when I boarded my plane the following morning I found that my aisle seat was next to Mr Daniel Vettori’s. His wife and two month old son, James, were by the window. He recognised me from my asking lots of questions at press conferences and he congenially said hello but he clearly wasn’t after a good old chinwag.

I guess the New Zealand captain and highly economical spin bowler, who is ranked number four in the world ODI bowler’s rankings, didn’t want me to ask him why he played in only the first few matches this season. He has sat out of the next seven matches.

When I looked up the Reliance Rankings, as they are now named, I saw another Kiwi’s name at number two. Kyle Mills is apparently fit as a fiddle and desperate to play for the Mumbai Indians but he is yet to be given a game.

The amount of money wasted on cricket player’s salaries for this tournament would be enough to put a dent inn the battle against world hunger. Consider the fact that Mashrafe Mortaza from Bangladesh receives a salary of 600 000 US dollars per season from the Kolkata Knight Riders and has never even played a match for them.

So I was sitting next to Vettori when I thought I would stretch across his sleeping body and lift up the blanket covering his son’s face to get a good look at the little tiger, only to find the baby breastfeeding. Vettori senior awoke at this delicate point in procedings and I quickly looked the other way.

However East London is a bustling metropolis when compared to Kimberley. The stark beauty of the North Eastern Cape landscape surrounds the airstrip where my 40-seater twin-propeller South African Airways plane landed on Monday. My father calls it mamfa – miles and miles of fuck all!.

The old diamond town was a British stronghold where rogues like Barney Barnato and Cecil John Rhodes found their fortune was famously besieged by the Boers for 124 days over the turn of the 20th Century, during the Boer War. The town is famous for the big hole; a seriously deep crater dug by hand that yielded 15 million carats of diamonds.

I arrived at the De Beers Oval nice and early for the match and mine was the fourth car in the queue to enter the media car park. Amazingly it took forty minutes – the same amount of time Bangalore yesterday took to score 110 runs – to enter the car park. Each car and bag inside it was thoroughly searched and then searched again before it could progress up a ramp so that my car’s underside could be checked for explosives. Fifteen policemen handled the operation and I missed the toss.

The Deccan Chargers posted a formidable 166 runs with newcomer Andrew Symonds making runs for the second time in as many matches at that ground. But it was the Calypso batting of West Indian Dwayne Smith that earned the player of the match (what was wrong with saying man of the match?) award.

The Rajasthan Royals put up a poor fight as they were bowled out for 113 runs. But their biggest potential loss of the evening was that their captain, Shane Warne, pulled a hamstring and may spend the final ten days of the tournament on the sidelines. Warne would prefer to be in the thick of the action but it would allow him more time to play poker and womanise.

The first impressive performance this season by a New Zealander took place last night as the under pressure Kolkata captain, Brendon McCullum, smashed 84 runs from 64 balls to help his side post 173 at Centurion. It looked a winning total but could the side that has won one match from eleven defend it on a pitch that offered assistance to both swing and spin bowlers?

Of course they could not. John Buchanan, who coached Australia in their glory years, is an awful T20 coach and McCullum is a pathetic T20 captain. The relatively unknown Sri Lankan, Angelo Matthews was preferred to Charl Langeveldt, probably the best death bowler in South Africa and Mccullum’s bowling changes were inexplicable.

Mystery spinner, Ajentha Mendis was given the second over when the ball was swinging like a banana. David Hussey was given only one over and that over was during the powerplay. Ganguly, the most economical bowler of last year’s tournament and a bowler that is most effective when the ball is swinging wasn’t given even one over.

Bangalore required 14 runs an over with four overs to go when another Kiwi, Ross Taylor launched his assault on Ishant Sharma, aged Ajit Agarkar and inexperienced Angelo Matthews. Taylor’s 81 came from 33 balls – an astonishing strike rate of 245.45 runs per 100 balls – as he struck seven fours and five sixes and outdid his fellow Kiwi, McCullum, winning the match with four balls to spare.

The Kolkata Knight Riders are the only team of eight that cannot qualify for the semi-finals. Delhi looks safe at the top of the table and Chennai and Deccan look relatively safe just behind. So it looks most likely that Mumbai, Bangalore, Rajasthan and Punjab fight it out for that highly coveted fourth spot. But, of course, it’s not yet as clear cut as that!

That IPL TV coverage: is it really too exciting?

From the June issue of SPIN, out on May 8, which also features Andy Flower, Atul Sharma, Ian Blackwell, Courtney Walsh, Chris Read and Michael Vaughan’s art and load of other top stuff. Buy it in shops or order it for home delivery from here.

Last year, my attempts to subscribe to Setanta for the IPL almost came unstuck as, to get the cricket, I was required to – crazily – sign up for a full season of football, despite having already missed 90 per cent of the season. The terms and conditions of the contract run to a full 2826 words. This year, with Setanta keen for any business they can get, things are different. Play your cards right and you could see all 61 IPL games for a grand total of less than £50. Which is, fair’s fair, pretty good. Readers, I signed up.

I tune in for Day 1 of the IPL: Flintoff and Dhoni’s Chennai Super Kings v Tendulkar’s Mumbai Indians. Last year, the IPL’s gantry team copped stick for being too excited. This year, it was slower going…

14 mins Our host Mark Nicholas hands down to the pitchside reporter for the first time. It is former New Zealand seamer Simon Doull. Sounds promising, no? No. Of course it doesn’t. He’s an amiable fellow but in terms of communicating excitement – all-action cricket! Cheerleaders! Cash! – he’s so deadpan as to make Paul Allott and Mike Atherton seem like the Chuckle Brothers. How do these people get these jobs?

“Thanks very much Mark. Well, it’s a magnificent atmosphere,” begins Doull nervously. “I’ve just had a chat to Stephen Fleming, the Chennai coach. He seems to think about 150-160 would be a very good score to limit these guys to.”

That’s how magnificent the atmosphere is, viewers. Doull takes nondescript to new levels. You certainly couldn’t pick him out of an identity parade. Unless everyone else in the parade had a bit of personality.

23 mins With Jacob Oram set to bowl the seventh over, a dog takes to the pitch.

“Ha,” says Nicholas, then says nothing at all for a good 20 seconds as he prepares some canine quips. Finally, he summons up something: “Nobody wants to go near Lassie in case, of course the bark isn’t as bad as the bite,” says Nicholas.

What does this mean?

“Simon Doull, what do you reckon?” he says. My heart sinks. Doull is pitchside, interviewing a very boyish Jonty Rhodes.

“Jonty – it’s not your dog is it?” he asks

“Not now,”quips Rhodes, rather well.

Back to the gantry. “Its a dog’s life at Newlands,” says Nicho, cheerfully. “We still can’t get rid of this bit of animal magic thats interrupted proceedings. So we’d better keep Simon Doull going.”

The zero option.

Finally, Setanta take us back to the studio where some fella from the ’70s called Dominik Holyer is talking to Ronnie Irani. Hoyler’s up against it: thanks to his job talking to taxi drivers for 14 hours a day on Talk Sport, Irani is a more famous presenter than Hoyler and really rather good at being relaxed on TV.

Welcome to cricket’s new age.

Irani [chuckling] Are you a dog lover?

Hoyler I am.

Irani Have you got your own dog?

Hoyler Yeah. Well we did until recvently.

Irani Hey hey. I must admit it’s a classic. It’s a lovely dog. Interesting stuff. But it looks a lovely dog, doesn’t it?

Hoyler Super.

Irani But whose dog is it though?

Gordon Bennett.

After an 11-minute delay we go back to the game. But the spell has been broken and it’s all very military medium. Nicho seems a little depressed.

50 mins The first ten overs are finally completed. It’s been all go.

84 mins Nicho comes out of a break with this: “One of the many things that go with IPL is the opportunity for one lucky girl to…”

To what, readers? Have dinner with Simon Doull? Second prize: two dinners?

No. The answer is “…end up in a Bollywood movie. Fifty thousand rupees are there for her, and a business class trip to India, as the tournament goes ahead with its Miss Bollywood South Africa compeition.”

The camera lingers on some fox in the crowd. Nicho continues: “We’re looking for that lady. Who knows? It might be you.”

Who this ‘we’ is, is not clear. The IPL? Setanta? Nicho and Simon Doull together, the deadly duo? I picture Nicho, looking groomed, smelling wonderful and ready for cocktails and Doull, looking dull, smelling of boredom and ready to paint the skirting board, back at the hotel, trawling through a mountain of risque photographs sent in by dusky Veldt-based Bollywood wannabes.

Not for the first time, I wonder if Nicho is, by some weird twist of space-time, leading a life actually intended for me.

I conclude he probably isn’t.

Surely this is the role for which Nicho was born: cricket commentary crossed with the chance to preside over an ongoing beauty contest, a format that has traditionally – well, traditionally in the 1970s anyway – been the preserve of the nation’s No 1 mainstream presenter. Aspel. Forsyth. Peter Marshall. You remember.

Maybe this is exactly why he was hired. Imagine Lalit Modi weighing up the options. Would Tony Greig be the man for the job? (“And. Let. Me. Tell. You. That is a fox! Oh no – no she isn’t! Hang on, maybe she is!”) Nasser Hussain maybe, shaking with rage and undermining the light-ent vibe?

I don’t think so. (Obviously the correct answer would have been Ravi Shastri, immaculate, like the prince of a small but very wealthy country. He makes Nicho look like Steptoe and Son. Maybe he turned it down.)

86 mins Freddie Flintoff gets hit for the first three sixes of the tournament and we rediscover the fact that in IPL land, they are not sixes but ‘DLF maximums’. Within days, Flintoff will make his excuses and leave after hurting his knee trying to lift a big bag of money.

And I’ll still be wondering what happened to Dominik Holyer’s dog.

Atul Sharma exclusive interview and pics in June issue of Spin magazine

Buy the June issue of SPIN featuring an exclusive seven-page interview and photo shoot with Atul Sharma, here.

The new issue of SPIN magazine is in the shops on Friday (May 8). We’ll have full info here from Wednesday but I just wanted to flag up one story that I think is going to make a bit of a splash.

This is my interview with Atul Sharma. UK-based cricket-watchers will never have heard of him at all, I shouldn’t think; while, among Indian supporters, even the biggest devotees of fansites will know only a little.

No use Googling Atul Sharma or looking at cricinfo either. Because they don’t have anything on him.

The thing is: Sharma has never played a senior game; in fact has not played a competitive game of any kind for seven years – and yet he is in the Rajasthan Royals IPL squad, alongside Shane Warne, Dimitri Mascarenhas et al.

The story that explains these two apparently contradictory facts is – and I don’t think I’m overegging it here – one of the most remarkable in modern sport.

Sharma, now 23, has spent the last seven years teaching himself to bowl at speeds in excess of 100 mph. He’s trained with US Olympic javelin coaches and built the body of a power-athlete, rather than of a traditional fast bowler. He’s also worked with the English fast bowling coach Ian Pont, a firm believer that pace and control need not be mutually exclusive – indeed, that the two are both influenced by the same factors.

Anyhow, I’ve had a very long and enjoyable chat with Atul in which he has told me his full story – including overcoming injuries that threatened to stop him playing at all. I found his story unique and genuinely inspiring – he has not been involved with any official academies or coaching set-ups; he’s funded everything himself, just following a teenage hunch with complete single-mindedness.

Not that I want to hype him(!). I think getting a pro contract at 23 having never played a game is remarkable enough in itself, even were he never to take a wicket, or to bowl at ‘just’ 85 mph. But he does seem to be on the verge of being India’s and possibly the world’s fastest-ever bowler.

We’ve also had some beautiful pictures taken of him training in South Africa – showing his innovative action step-by-step – by the top snapper Jurie Potgieter.

The whole package runs across seven pages of the June issue, out in the UK on May 8.

Buy the June issue of SPIN featuring an exclusive seven-page interview and photo shoot with Atul Sharma, here.

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