The rain-interrupted IPL final began on Sunday night and ended on Tuesday morning. It has to be the longest final in the tournament’s history, almost running the course of a test match on a turning and crumbling Indian pitch.
I was watching it in Dehradun, where it was raining too—it’s been a wet summer everywhere. When the rains stopped here, they started in Ahmedabad and vice versa, confusing my 79-year-old mother no end. I said to her Monday night, as she was finishing dinner, that the match will resume at 12.12 on Tuesday morning, and she replied, “But it’s still raining.” I reminded her gently that it was raining here, not there. It was perplexing for everyone involved.
Ravindra Jadeja hit the winning runs at about 1.45 am and India went nuts. The Chennai Super Kings, no, sorry, Mahendra Singh Dhoni had won. It’s all that everybody wanted. Moments earlier, Mohit Sharma had got Thala out for a duck, stunning India into a deafening silence in the thick of the night. As Jadeja hit the winning runs, a wedding party at a neighbour’s house cranked up the music as if in defiance, “Dil laiy gayi kudi Gujarat di.” The IPL is known for mixing it up – nationalities, regions, zones – so it was in the fitness of things that Jadeja, a Gujarat boy, hit the winning runs for Chennai, while it was Sudarshan Sai, a Chennai boy, who ramped it up for the Gujarat Titans smashing 96 off 47 balls.
The penultimate over had seen an unintentionally comic moment in a high-pressure game when Mohit Sharma, trying to save a boundary, crashed into the cooler box of the CSK dugout, sending players and bottles of water flying. It reminded me of those chaotic scenes in Hindi films from the 1980s, when Dharmendra would send potatoes and onions flying in fight scenes involving half a dozen pushcarts.
Post-match, the players mingled with their wives and children on the ground for almost an hour. Heart-warming as it was, I wondered if they had so much time, why couldn’t they have fitted in the five overs that were eventually lopped off due to rain, and had a full match. It was the final after all. But rules, I suppose, are rules.
We waited and waited. There was an interminable prize distribution ceremony. Shubhman Gill received a red mug (why a mug; he’s no mug!) for being the player of the series. Harsha Bhogle was walking around in what looked like a dupatta, looking as pretty as Mumtaz. We were waiting for Dhoni. He came on at 2.55 am and promised to come back next year, if his body held out. India went nuts, again.
Meanwhile, back in the post-match studio they went on for another 20 minutes, with Graeme Swann joking “Keep going, lads, I have a flight back to England at 10.30 in the morning, let’s keep going till then.” AB Devilliers, the IPL’s second favourite after Dhoni, had fallen asleep standing, with his eyes wide open. He didn’t say a word for the concluding 30 minutes. Talk about burning the midnight oil with the IPL.
When the winning runs were hit, Dhoni’s face was turned downwards, as if he was calmly winding an old HMT wrist watch. We soon found out why. Tears had welled up in his eyes, along with millions of fans. It was hard not to be moved by the moment.
The IPL gets bigger and glitzier every year: the spectacular fireworks, so spectacular that you have to wear shades; the glittering stadiums; the quirky puns on the stadium big screen; and if you are watching on TV, the sexy, seductive, camera angles changing at the speed of light.
Critics and purists complain about it having become too commercial, but no one can take away the fact that it gives players an incredible platform to showcase their talent and skill. India has an enormous pool of cricketing talent, not all of which can fit into the national eleven. There are veterans with still a lot of fire left in them, like Wriddhiman Saha and Piyush Chawla. There is uncapped talent that gets an opportunity to shine, like Sai (he has never played for India). New stars are born, like Yashasvi Jaiswal. It accelerates the evolution of contemporary stars like the elegant prince, Shubhman Gill. It allows Test greats like Ajinkya Rahane and Mohammad Shami to reinvent themselves. It plucks special talent from other countries, like Little Malinga, Matheesha Pathirana, not part of the Sri Lankan squad, but an IPL star this year.
True, it is ultra commercial. Only in the IPL does the viewer get ads even between the ad breaks. The commentary is punctuated with relentless product placement. But then, this money also goes into the game. It gives the players a stable career. The talent scouts of franchises spend years tracking players’ progress, nurturing them even when they are not playing. This is where Jasprit Bumrah came from, going on to become India’s pace spearhead. Every Ranji Trophy game has meaning and significance. The quality of cricket cannot be argued with.
Also, it’s commercial because the audience loves it. No one forces fans to switch on the TV or go to the stadium to watch a match. They do so willingly, because they like the game, adore the players. Women, kids, toddlers, older folk, expats, and tourists: the IPL attracts a new audience, those who might ordinarily not watch cricket. It’s good for an unusual sport, unusual in the sense that it is the only sport with four formats (10s, T20, ODI and Tests)—each a different ballgame, yet coming from the same mother. Of course, T20 slides into its own formula. By the end of it I was tired of listening to the phrases, ‘back of a length ball’, ‘take the pace off the ball’, ‘cross-seam’ and ‘tacky wicket’. Which is why, I can’t wait for the World Test Championship final in England. The terminology changes, the skill-set changes, the game changes.
As I mentioned, the IPL attracts a new audience. The biggest pleasure this year was watching it with my mother. She was the one who got me into cricket when I was a seven-year-old. One day she gave me a small transistor and asked me to listen to test match commentary. I think it was India and the West Indies playing. I was hooked. Watching the IPL, she’d fret about the wicket (slow or full of runs); the toss; she’d grumble if she felt that the captain had given the ball to the wrong bowler at that stage of the game (“Arre, why has Dhoni given the ball to Deshpande”). She was also catching up with the new lot: “Is this Hardik? Is he the captain of the Gujarat Titans?” At times, she was curious where the overseas players were from, like CSK’S Devon Conway. I had to Google that one: South African, settled in New Zealand. She stayed up till two to watch Dhoni’s team win and we exchanged high-fives. I asked her why she loved Dhoni, and she said she doesn’t know, maybe his simplicity, the way his grey hairs are showing and he doesn’t bother dyeing, the manner in which he micromanages his fielders without shouting at them. Whatever it is, there is something about Dhoni.
Dhoni. One cannot talk about this IPL without talking about him. Not after Tendulkar has an Indian player been showered with so much affection. Every stadium was a sea of yellow, like it was Basant Panchami. The fans would turn up in CSK colours (out of love and respect for Dhoni), but wave GT flags. It was almost like he was the face of the IPL. No one sets out to be loved when they start playing a sport. Being the best one can be and getting to the top might be a goal, maybe making pots of money. But love is something abstract yet concrete. It’s impalpable yet palpable. It’s not something one can plan for.
This was the year that the love for Dhoni reached a tipping point. The dam broke. It was a flood. It had momentum. It swept every Indian cricket fan away in its arc. No wonder when Dhoni cried, the country cried with him. And Dhoni didn’t disappoint, hitting some huge retro sixes, even as the decibel levels in the stadiums crossed the sound barrier. Talk about sonic boom.
The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolor Youth and the editor of House Spirit: Drinking in India. Views expressed are personal.
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