Jarrod Kimber & Estelle Vasudevan

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ODI Cricket was massive in the early 2000s. Crowds were good, even at places like Lord’s, that had trouble fully committing to the new format. Free-to-air TV companies loved the 100 advertisements they could fit into the play. Cable broadcasters embraced how much content there was. 50 overs cricket wasn’t new, it had started in 1971, but it was the 1990s when it completely took off. 

Then came an ECB focus group, which inspired the birth of T20 cricket. A popular club format, that the ECB brought in to bring evening crowds to cricket grounds. It worked, but even so, other boards took their time before starting their own leagues. 

It was a novelty, a marketing gimmick, and no one took it seriously, least of all the players. Now it is the cash register and political muscle of cricket. But all that only happened when one of the fastest-growing nations on earth partnered with one of the fastest-growing sports. Cricket had a big bang, a maximum if you will. 

Before T20 took over and in the early wave of ODI madness, there was a man called Lalit Modi (who had left America after a story that included drugs and kidnapping). He wanted city-based, privately owned teams competing in a tournament featuring Indian and foreign players. It was the IPL, but for 50 over cricket, in the 90s. 

That was more than a decade before anyone else. Despite being a visionary, he rubbed many the wrong way. And cricket was just not ready for this kind of thing anyway. When Martin Crowe invented Cricket Max people laughed. But by 2007, things had changed.

The first actual franchise league would not be Lalit Modi’s creation, but the ‘rebel’ Indian Cricket League or the ICL. A doomed unprofessional mess of a tournament with some early success that really copied much of Modi’s blueprint.  That rebel league was the final catalyst for the BCCI to begin a franchise competition of their own. 

The concept for the IPL was put together in 2007, coincidentally the year in which we saw the first T20 World Cup. This was a tournament that the BCCI argued against, and then their senior-most players didn’t turn up for. A lot changed when Misbah Ul Haq spooned a ball to short fine leg against a young team of Indian players led by MS Dhoni. This tournament went from not mattering to being India’s first World title since 1983. 

Soon we had franchises with nicknames that were a bit bizarre buying India’s best players. Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Punjab and Kolkata-based teams signed Virender Sehwag, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Yuvraj Singh and Saurav Ganguly as their Icon Players. The teams were given a purse of five million USD at the auction but had to spend a minimum of 3.3 million. The Rajasthan Royals were fined after the first round of auctioning, for not spending the minimum amount.

MS Dhoni, on the back of his incredible rise to fame and the pied piper of the World Cup win, got a with a price tag of 1.5m USD – he was the first millionaire and most expensive buy of the auction. Andrew Symonds and 38-year-old Sanath Jayasuriya were the next most expensive, going at 1.35m and 975k. Cricket wasn’t used to millionaires. Or even paying players their worth. Now they were being auctioned off in prime time as livestock. 

Organisers were also keen on exposing young players and so assigned two India Under-19 players to each franchise via a draft.  Delhi had first pick but went for left-arm quick Pradeep Sangwan, while RCB bagged Delhi-born Virat Kohli.

The 2008 IPL had Pakistani players, it was the only time as well. As there was a shadow ban of them afterwards. The ICL actually had a team called the Lahore Badshahs full of Pakistan players. 

The tournament’s opening ceremony was more extravagant than cricket was used to.  Bollywood was now a part of cricket through people like Shah Rukh Khan being owners. The glitz was important, but the business meant more, with names like Mukesh Ambani and Vijay Mallya among the franchise owners.

The cricket also looked different. If you had grown up watching white-ball cricket turn into the ODI pyjama format, well, Brendon McCullum strolled into the middle adorned in a gold helmet and pads to match for the opening game. 

He then took down the RCB bowling line-up, swinging his bat like a gladiator in the Colosseum he was supposed to represent for a team called the Knight Riders. (The name seemingly taken from a 1982 tv show about a talking car).  He smashed 158 off 73 balls – the only other batter in the KKR line-up to score at faster than a run a ball was Mohammed Hafeez and he made 5 off 3. The IPL might have been a success without this knock, but this exploded the first game. It’s still one of the greatest T20 innings ever played. 

The tournament was entertaining, it had the high-scoring games and low-scoring thrillers you need to start a new venture. New stars were born from nowhere, like MS Gony. Before, to be a star you needed to be in the top eleven players of your nation, and usually one of the five most well known. Gony bowled a couple of good spells and had an interesting backstory and everyone was talking about him. 

But the big name players were there as well. Shane Warne was part player and part promoter. And RCB signed up all the best Test players around. This helped the crowds flock in numbers that made no sense for domestic cricket. And the TV audiences were crazy, even for India, and cricket. Even for cricket in India. 

It didn’t even seem to matter that the top three awards all went to overseas players. Shaun Marsh, a late entrant to the tournament, ended up as the highest run-scorer, bagging the first-ever Orange Cap. The left-hander, who was yet to represent Australia at the time, was signed for just 30k USD by the Kings XI Punjab. He scored 616 runs at a strike rate of 140 and was a key figure in one of their most successful campaigns. 

Sohail Tanvir was by far the most effective Pakistani player in the tournament. The relatively unknown, wrong-footed left-arm quick, like Marsh, didn’t even play all his side’s games but picked the most wickets in the tournament – 22 in 11 matches at an incredible strike rate of 11.22. He also became the first to pick up a 5-wicket haul in the IPL – his 6/14 was the best bowling performance recorded in the competition for over a decade. His lone season in the IPL proved to be a launching pad for a hugely successful career as a T20 specialist.

Those two were fairly unknown, Shane Watson was well-established. But he had never quite lived up to his early hype. Outside of incredible short bursts in the 2007 World Cup, he was kind of seen as a bust. But for those five weeks in India, he was a beast. His best performance came in the semi-final against the Delhi Daredevils. He belted 52 off 29 to help Rajasthan post 192 and then with his opening spell, he ended any hope of a Delhi chase with 3 for 10. Finishing fourth on the list of wicket-takers and run-getters, he became the IPL’s first MVP.

The tournament had plenty more special moments on the field, it was like a fantasy for 90s kids. Sachin Tendulkar and Sanath Jayasuriya walking out to bat together is still talked about today. Even cricket nerds got Glenn McGrath and Mohammed Asif opening the bowling for Delhi Daredevils – wrist perfection from each end. And perhaps one of the the hardest to dismiss Test pairings ever, with Rahul Dravid and Shiv Chanderpaul together at the top of the order for RCB.

Off the field there were conversations about the advertising for each event, and people loved and hated the cheerleaders. There were even allegations of racist and sexist behavior. Of course Vijay Mallya of RCB had to have the most eye-catching cheerleaders, hiring them from the NFL team Washington Redskins (a team that also would have a controversial owner and recent name change).

On the field was the slap, Harbhajan Singh taking down Sreesanth. Nobody really knows the exact story, but Harbhajan’s emotions seemed to have bubbled over following a third consecutive loss for Mumbai Indians, showing that it meant a lot. Meanwhile Punjab’s Sreesanth was caught on camera sobbing uncontrollably. After an investigation, Harbhajan was suspended for the rest of the tournament. 

That wasn’t the only player ousted. Asif was banned for a year after he tested positive for steroids. By the time his ban would lift, Pakistani players were no longer welcome at the IPL.

It went better for Rajasthan Royals. While the other teams stacked their squads with stars, Rajasthan went in the opposite direction. The lack of big names meant people assumed they would finish at the bottom of the table (not that anyone had any idea what would work or not). Those predictions only grew in number as they crashed to a nine-wicket loss in their first game. But from then on, they went on an incredible run of 11 wins in their next 13 games to top the standings at the end of the group stage.

They may just have been the first ‘moneyball’ team we’ve seen in cricket. Cricket had been state-run for years, but suddenly, businessmen wanted results, and decisions had to be justified. 

After being overlooked for Australian leadership for off-field reasons, Warne was captain and coach of Rajasthan with a team of misfit toys under him. He took it very seriously and seemed to see it as a chance to prove that he should have captained Australia. The relatively unseen and untested capabilities of Neeraj Patel, Swapnil Asnodkar, Ravindra Jadeja and Yusuf Pathan combined well with the experience of Watson, Graeme Smith and Tanvir, with Warne orchestrating it all. In Warne’s words, ‘It was just one of those things that was meant to be’.

In 2008, T20 Cricket was at its infancy. Be it strategy, squad building, or team combinations, it seemed like nobody really had any idea about how to go about things. Most was trial and error. Compare that to now, where analytics are one of the most integral parts of the game and the IPL is the leader in all aspects.

When it all began, there were traditionalists who claimed it wasn’t even ‘real cricket’. That goes for T20, and doubly for the IPL. And yet before the year was done, other boards tried to replicate its success. In 17 years, the IPL has gone above and beyond anyone’s imagination – a juggernaut of an event with no signs of slowing down.

The interesting thing is now that if ODI cricket’s heyday was 1992 until 2008, the IPL has been more successful for pretty much the same time. And while there were people who thought it would work, it has outgrown almost everything except Lalit Modi’s dreams. 

The first tournament was confusing and bizarre. It was Indian capitalism spray-painted on cricket. 

To show what a different world cricket was back then, the captains went out and signed up to the MCC’s Spirit of Cricket pledge. That whole thing seems like another world now. Something very English and old school. The idea of the IPL needing to sign something from the MCC now seems weird. And really, what those players were doing that day was not some pact about ‘spirit’, they were singing on to buy cricket. 

And it has been the IPL’s ever since.

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