Choosing the 15

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What could be tougher than choosing 15 players? Choosing 15 rules, says L Suresh.

January 17, 2011. Chennai. The selection committee, its Chairman and a few BCCI officials - vice presidents, secretaries, the joint secretary, treasurer, lackeys, spokespersons, zonal representatives and the like – comprised the 20-member committee that would shortly select 15 members for the Indian cricket team, to play in the World Cup. All of them had their agenda on a sheet of paper, neatly typed and filed in a plastic folder on the table before them. 15 of them would get a chance to choose one player each. Of the remaining five, three were to choose the menu for the day. The other two would get to pick the airline in which they would all head back to their respective cities.

But these choices were secondary. They had a more important task ahead of them – they had to pick 15 rules that the BCCI would then shove down the throat of the ICC.

“15 rules? Why do we have to do that?” asked a selector. “Aren’t we here to select 15 players for our team?”

“That’s right, but we have also been asked to choose 15 rules that will make the World Cup very India-friendly,” responded an official.

“But I thought the objective was to make India friendly for fans from the world over,” began another selector.

“The tourism department will take care of that. Our job is to ensure that our players find the World Cup friendly,” replied the official.

“But why?”

“Look, Sachin has made it clear that he will not retire without winning a World Cup. The next World Cup will be held in Australia and you can bet your last IPL dollar that they will ensure fast, bouncy tracks – you know how our boys fare on such surfaces… He will be 42 then. The World Cup in 2019 will be played in England and God knows if we will have the team to handle the swing like Kapil and his boys did. He will be 46 then. If we still don’t get to win the World Cup, he will look forward to the 2023 World Cup when he will be 50 – by then his son Arjun will be in the team and we will…”

“Ok, we get the message. So what now?”

“We have to win the 2011 World Cup – at all costs.”

The operative word was ‘costs’. Every member at the table was all ears. The official continued. “So what are the rules that will help us win the World Cup?”

One of the vice presidents piped up. “But will the other countries – and specially the ICC – agree if we change the rules for this world cup?”

The official remained unruffled. “Why not? We changed the rules of the IPL at will. We created auctions for players to be sold instead of being selected. We ensured that teams would be owned by companies instead of being sponsored by them. We stopped play for ads and called them strategy breaks. We brought in the ropes and had shorter boundaries. Nobody questioned us then. Why should they do so now? Besides, all of us know that the BCCI is not part of the ICC – on the contrary, the ICC is part of the BCCI, though in a reversed sequence. So they will not ask questions. And,” he gave a Godfather-like pause, “neither should you.”

There was silence in the room.

“We’ll have your suggestions now.” And each member gave his suggestion which was, in turn, converted into a rule.

Rule 1: Each match would feature two pitches so that India can bat on a flat wicket and bowl on a dusty one. (If the World Cup in ’92 could have two balls per team, why not two pitches?)

Rule 2: Bouncers will only be allowed at post-match parties and will not be a part of the match. (If cheergirls have no place in cricket, shouldn’t bouncers be banned too?) So fast bowlers who bowl bouncers will not feature in any further matches and will have to restrict their presence to performing at the parties.

Rule 3: Any ball above the waist will be a no-ball. To determine this, the waist of the shortest member of the Indian team will be taken into account, preferably Sachin or Raina.

Rule 4: Allrounders – especially fast bowling allrounders - will not be allowed in any match (since we don’t have one). However, they can make their money by sitting in the studios with Kapil Paaji and commenting on the day’s play.

Rule 5: Since the average speed allowed in most roads in India is only 40 kmph, similar speed limits will be exercised in cricket matches to ensure that the game isn’t a bad influence on the younger generation. However, the only exception to this rule would be during the powerplays when the bowlers can operate at speeds of 60kmph.

Rule 6: With the IPL beginning just days after the World Cup, Indian players will play all their matches – including the final – before March 15 so that they have enough rest before the IPL begins.

Rule 7: Any player who has been signed up for more than a million in the IPL will be allowed to name a substitute player who can take his place in the match whenever he feels the need for it.

Rule 8: Instead of UDRS, all the referrals will be done by the public through sms contests. So, if a majority of the Indian public feel that Sachin is not out – he will be declared not out. But this facility will be available only in India, so fans of other teams will not be able to participate.

Rule 9: Slide stops will be banned while fielding. All teams will instruct their fielders to run after the ball and stop it if they can, Indian style.

Rule 10: Considering the fact that Sholay was released in the same year as the first World Cup in 1975, the coincidence will be celebrated with Dhoni being honoured with the Sholay coin (with heads on both sides) that he can use for the toss. Besides, it’s only the Indian team that has both Viru (Sehwag) and Jai (Jaidev Unadkat, who unfortunately will not play the World Cup) – so they qualify on both counts.

Rule 11: If India are dismissed in 20 overs (or thereabouts), the game will automatically be recalibrated into a Twenty20 game so that the other team does not have an undue advantage.

Rule 12: India is a country of 1.2 billion people while Netherlands on the other hand, has a population of just around 16.5 million. So, having the same number of players per team is not fair. While the game will be played as per rules with one bowler and a batsman at either end, the number of fielders allowed on the field will be proportionate to the population of the country that the team hails from.

Rule 13: In case of rain, every member of the Indian team will be allotted flood relief measures of 25 runs and 2 wickets which he can use in any future match, at his discretion.

Rule 14: As a precautionary marketing clause, any Indian batsman whose ad appears before an over cannot be dismissed or given out during that over as the brand will suffer from his poor performance.

Rule 15: As the Indian team is being forced to play all its matches (barring one) on weekends because of TRP demands, the results of these matches should go in favour of the home team for its sportive gesture, as the rest of the country would be putting its feet up and watching TV.

10 teams + 10 commandments = Twenty20

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L Suresh examines the 10 commandments that emerged from the IPL auction.

A weekend when adults played monopoly. A shopping spree when some players became much sought-after possessions while others were treated like perishable items in a distress sale. A frosty winter session when cold, calculative minds advised billionaires on how to create millionaires out of young cricketers. 14 hours when heroes were brought down and their younger replacements unveiled.

12 cricketers retained. A further 127 sold (or bought, depending on whom your sympathies are with). 215 sent back home with their price tags still stuck to their backsides. (“Do they have to come in and stand in the room when they are being auctioned?” an uninformed friend asked me.)

One sweeping look at the 10 huddles across the room (anything more than a split-second glance would have been a waste of time as the scenery stayed the same for 13 hours and 58 minutes – the two minutes of dissonance occurred when Sidhartha Mallya went across to the Kings XI table to wage war over a youngster to whom at least two franchisees were ready to hand their future over to.) would have conveyed the prevailing mood amongst various camps – unlike the first bidding session, there were to be no sacred cows, only cash cows. God, King Midas and the Butcher were already held back by their teams. The rest would now contest for their Hummers and farmhouses.

Finally, as the dust settled, one did not get the feeling of having witnessed a Greek epic. But the makings of a Bollywood potboiler were there, alright. There was great tragedy, action, slapstick comedy, euphoria, money bags, anti-climaxes, sub-plots, a mammoth star cast… and a grand finale when everyone goes home happy humming the familiar song that gives all lost and found sequences a happy ending - ‘We are family’.

Surprisingly, the auction also left behind a message – to be specific, 10 of them.

1. You shall not change a winning combination

It's the oldest rule in the cricketing book. That's exactly what the Chennai Superkings – and to an extent, Mumbai Indians, did. And by doing so, they were not only reuniting players who had played together, they were also bringing back the team that had won together.

2. You shall not make changes for the sake of making changes

Why did the Deccan Chargers not retain Adam Gilchrist, Rohit Sharma, Andrew Symonds and Ryan Harris? Why did the Royal Challengers let go of Dale Steyn and Ross Taylor, or the Delhi Daredevils, Gautam Gambhir and Dirk Nannes? More importantly, do they believe that they have got equivalent or better replacements in players like Morne Morkel and Aaron Finch?

Sweeping changes, fresh starts and clean slates may work well for election campaigns, but seldom do in team selection. For one, a new team with people speaking different languages will take time to settle down together. Creating a team culture, understanding strengths and weaknesses, complementing one another on the field, finding the best combination, working out strategies based on the men at one's disposal – half the IPL would be over by the time this checklist is completed.

Kochi and Pune don't have a choice in the matter. Kings XI and Knightriders would possibly have wanted to make big changes after having found themselves not only at the bottom of the barrel, but also in the midst of controversies. But as for the other six teams, the prudent thing would have been to create an existing nucleus and build a team around them. Instead, they pressed the plunger and ripped existing teams to smithereens.

3. You shall swallow your pride, even if you’ve won the ashes

Brendon McCullum goes for $475,000 while Uthappa goes for $2,000,000. Brad Haddin goes for $325,000 while Dinesh Karthik fetched $900,000, a figure that bracketed him with another keeper, Gilchrist. Sreesanth's performance in South Africa works in his favour, but an English win down under does nothing for the Queen's men. As far as the auctions went, they were dubbed the barmy army – a bunch of players who were nuts if they thought if they would get the kind of base prices that they had quoted.

As for other foreign players, the menu was bitter right through – besides swallowing pride, they had to eat crow, some humble pie and for the betting kind, their hats too. The West Indian batting trio of Lara, Chanderpaul and Sarwan, Lankan legends like Vaas and Jayasuriya, and of course, James Anderson and Graeme Swann who are still dusting the ashes from their cricketing whites will now follow the IPL Season 4 from vantage points in their living rooms.

4. You shall aim for the future, even if you don’t know where it is

Saurabh Tiwary ($1,600,000). Dan Christian ($900,000). Umesh Yadav ($750,000). Obviously there were team think-tanks out there that saw things that the rest of us mortals didn't. Whether these are the players who will become the stars of IPL Seasons 4, 5 and 6 remains to be seen. It began as speculative bidding. Let’s hope that it does not end as retirement benefits. Moral of the story: If the team's think-tank doesn't think, the team will tank...

5. You shall not fit square pegs into round holes, but you can fit allrounders anywhere

The last time Irfan Pathan played a test was in 2008. He showed up for his last ODI in Feb 2009 and for his last T20 match, four months later. It's almost been a year since he's featured in a domestic match. And yet, when the clarion call for an allrounder was sounded, Delhi Daredevils saw him larger-than-life and downloaded a cartful of dollars - $1,900,000 to be precise - on his lap. Other teams clamoured for allrounders too. Abhishek Nayar went at $800,000, Ravindra Jadeja at $950,000, Angelo Mathews at $950,000 and of course, Yusuf Pathan – he of the recent Kiwi carnage in Bengaluru – for $2,100,000. One just hopes that the franchises are understanding enough to give their allrounders enough time to count the dollars before they can land up for the games.

6. You shall not throw money around, but overthrows are allowed

What do you do when you release a rarely used player from your fold? Simple, you buy him for 4.5 times the amount. That's what the Rajasthan Royals – the team that came in with a little legal hole in their purse which drained them of a couple of millions even before the auctions began – did when they bought back Johan Botha for $950,000. Team Kochi meanwhile decided that local flavour was worth any amount and went into an aggressive price war for Sreesanth who was finally bought at $900,000. Venugopala Rao for $700,000 brings a familiar question always asked in cricketing circles – is he related, by any chance?

7. You shall not listen to ex-cricketers; they are good for action, not auction

What's common to Darren Lehman, Geoff Marsh, Geoff Lawson and Michael Bevan, besides the fact that they're all Australian? And the fact that they have all tasted success at the highest form, both as players and as coaches? All of them froze like deer caught in headlights when the auction was on, leaving their lesser competent team-members to wreak havoc with the numbers and team composition. Would Bevan be able to explain Piyush Chawla's $900,000 price tag? Or would Lawson be able to expect much from a bowling attach comprising Sreesanth, R P Singh, Ramesh Powar and Vinay Kumar? Surely Marsh hasn't seen rare footage of Uthappa that we seem to have missed, for him to be bought at $2,100,000?

Looking at performance of the Australian players in the Ashes, you would think that as a cricketing nation, they’ve lost the plot. Looking at their ex-players performing at the IPL auction, you’re sure of it.

8. You shall stay away from controversial players; learn to differentiate between good buys and good-byes

One of the first items in the clean-up agenda adopted by various franchises was to get rid of controversies and those who caused it. While a diktat seemed to have been issued against Gibbs (post his autobiography), others like Gayle who found themselves in the center of the tornado at KKR simply found no takers. Surely performance could have nothing to do with this – while Gayle remained unsold at the auction, in another hemisphere, he was stirring up a performance worthy of his name, slamming 32 off an over in the Twenty20 Big Bash match between Western Australia (whom he played for) and NSW.

Of course, the buzz for the weekend for all news channels was the total, unemotional and comprehensive send-off that Sourav was given. While 10 franchises heaved a sigh of relief that he wasn’t brought back into the auction a second time, a different kind of heaving was witnessed in the east as Kolkata played the angry mother, nostrils flared and chest heaving, indignant that her favourite son was being given a raw deal.

A whole city got together to damn the franchises. The teams however, gave a damn.

9. You shall make as many confounding decisions in two days before the BCCI takes over for the rest of the year

If Deccan Chargers play on till the finals, they stand to lose their wicketkeeper-captain and leading batsman as Sri Lanka’s tour of England would be underway by then, leaving Sangakkara and Kevin Pietersen to make an airdash so that they slip into their cricketing whites just in time for the first test. Delhi Daredevils went through 350 players and finally chose one part-time spinner in Roelof van der Merwe, knowing very well how crucial spin would be in India. Kings XI Punjab bought a second wicketkeeper (Dinesh Karthik) for $900,000 despite having invested in a keeper-captain (Adam Gilchrist) for the same amount. Rajasthan Royals didn’t bother shopping for a keeper at all. Meanwhile, Kings XI Punjab and the Deccan Chargers saved up over $2,000,000 for reasons known only to them. And then those confounding decisions on paying Indian pacers (and spinner, if you include Piyush Chawla) huge sums with no guarantee of their performance.

It was as if Mr. Bean, Jacques Clouseau, and the Dumb and Dumber duo were competing with one another at the auctions. Sadly, the show could last for just two days.

10. You shall spend as if there is no tomorrow… because there really may be no tomorrow if you are RR, KXI or Kochi

The next edition of the auction could well happen at the ICC headquarters, in Dubai, to coincide with the Dubai shopping festival. Looking at the way most franchises splurged, you would think that they were sure of the world coming to an end much before 2012. Can’t blame them though. Till the very end, there were franchises that were more worried about fitting into the IPL’s scheme of things before they figured out the players who would fit into their team.

11. You shall select allrounders if you must, but not multi-faceted players

Well, considering the fact that there are only 10 commandments, this is more a comment than a commandment. Players will multiple skills were definitely preferred by most franchises, but Iain O’Brien was rejected for this precise reason. He was not only a gifted cricketer, but also a terrific blogger.

The point was, no franchise was willing to be the starting point for a new blog on the IPL, this time titled ‘Real IPL Player’.