The day the IPL was born
On 18th April 1930, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) announcer had nothing to communicate in the 20:45 evening bulletin. “There is no news” was the script and piano music was played for the rest of the 15-minute segment. If the same BBC, from the home of cricket, had to broadcast another bulletin exactly 78 years later in 2008; the announcer would have been gasping for breath for the entire duration.
For, there was so much action happening on the cricket field in India, the new hub of cricket. It was the first match of the Indian Premier League (IPL), often referred as ‘India ka Tyohaar’ (festival of India). Riding on the success of the Indian cricket team in the 2007 Twenty 20 (T20) World Cup, the Indian administrators decided to bring in a franchise based cricket tournament which involved players from across the globe. Thus, the IPL was born and it changed cricket forever.
As Kolkata Knight Rider’s opening batsman Brendon McCullum took strike, Sunil Gavaskar who was on air referred to him as, “Brendon McCullum who s from New Zealand”. Ten years and eleven editions hence, players are known by the franchises that they play for. Long back in the second or third edition of the IPL, one of my close friends had brought up this point. He had said that the IPL was exciting and probably similar to football, where, say, a Real Madrid is part of Cristiano Ronaldo’s identity.
IPL brought a paradigm shift in cricket
IPL has definitely brought a paradigm shift in the way cricket is played and viewed. Who would have thought that Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh would one day share the same dressing room? The IPL made it a reality and international stars who would otherwise be at each other's necks while representing their respective countries, help out each other in this grand league.
Coming back to the day it all started, it was the match between the Sourav Ganguly led Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) and Rahul Dravid led Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru. Dravid won the toss and put the Knight Riders in to bat. Now, T20 cricket, in general, is favoured towards the batsmen and people expect high scores. But, what followed for the next hour or so mesmerized the spectators.
The start was slow by today’s standards. Those were still early days for T20 cricket, so we were not surprised when McCullum had not opened his account after six deliveries. In fact, the first over in the history of IPL delivered by Praveen Kumar produced just one run via a leg-bye. But things began to change very soon. McCullum scored 18 runs off the second over bowled by Zaheer Khan, who was immediately taken off the attack, but that didn’t help matters as far as RCB were concerned.
McCullum's 158 off 73 balls
To say that McCullum was in brutal form would have been an understatement. He raced off to a century in only 52 balls and was in no mood to end the carnage. He remained unbeaten on 158 runs off just 73 balls and took the KKR total to 222 runs in the allotted 20 overs. In the process, he hit 13 sixes and 10 boundaries. It was the highest individual score in the IPL till 2013 when Chris Gayle scored 175 runs for RCB against Pune Warriors in Bengaluru.
For the records, it is still the second highest ever individual score in IPL history. In response, the RCB were bowled out for 82 runs, thus giving the Knight Riders a thumping victory by a margin of 140 runs.
The fact that no other player crossed over 20 runs in the match, gives an idea about McCullum’s domination. He was probably redefining the word entertainment for the fans. Incidentally, it was on the same day in 1994, when another entertainer, the great Brian Lara had gone past Sir Gary Sober’s score of 365 in test match cricket. So, probably the day had been chosen by the Gods of cricket as a day to celebrate attacking batting.
All about entertainment & attacking batting
Entertainment and attacking batting are the words that we have been associating with the IPL for the last decade. The Kiwi batsman had just given us a preview of what one could expect from the batsmen in the years to come. And the tournament’s organisers or the fans couldn’t have wished for a better launching pad than the one provided by McCullum.
Since then, the IPL has thoroughly entertained all of us with sixes, boundaries, and close matches. Hitting out from the word go has become a norm and as Harsha Bhogle had once said (he was describing Chris Gayle’s hitting prowess), “6 and 4 seem to have become the new binary code”.