The birth of a whole new wave of T20 franchise competitions will bring about the death of international cricket according to every single article we’ve read in the last week or so. We don’t really know about that. We are pretty certain that they’ll bring about the death of several T20 franchise leagues though.

The two big new arrivals are the UAE’s International League T20 (ILT20) and South Africa’s yet-to-be-named T20 league (Update: The SA20). All six franchises in the latter were bought by IPL franchise owners. Five of the six UAE franchises are owned by Indian firms, including IPL owners. All of these teams are now in the process of hoovering up international cricketers.

T20 franchise cricket is taking over, everyone has quite reasonably concluded – because that’s where the money is.

But will these leagues make money?

Another way of looking at things is that there’s currently a bit of a land grab going on and T20 franchise cricket, as a whole, is overreaching.

These are the competitions taking place in January 2023:

• The ILT20 in the UAE
• The SA20
• The Big Bash
• The Bangladesh Premier League (BPL)

We’re pretty sure no-one’s jetting between the various leagues representing multiple franchises simultaneously, so that’s a lot of playing staff to find.

The first two have the financial clout and the IPL link-ups to call in many of the better known international players, but talent will still be spread far and wide and, unavoidably, somewhat thinly.

Thickness is relative, of course, but we’re comparing to the IPL.

The first batch of 21 ‘marquee’ signings trumpeted by the ILT20 included the likes of Akeal Hosein, Rovman Powell and Bhanuka Rajapaksa. No disrespect to these players, but their presence in such a list is indicative of how quickly things tail off. The teams all have to pick at least four players from the UAE as well. Again, no disrespect intended, but the IPL this isn’t.

And this is the thing, isn’t it? This is still T20, these are still franchises, but everything’s just fundamentally less than the IPL.

We’ve no idea what the projected market or TV deals are for either of these two new leagues, but viewed as competitions by fans, they’re defined by what they’re not. They’re paler imitations.

The Indian market is vast, but these are not Indian competitions and so they’re surely just out-and-out less interesting to the average Indian viewer. That must make it harder for franchises to get a direct return on their investment.

Perhaps that’s not the goal, although in that case it seems an expensive way to run a nursery/testing ground.

The same but less

This is probably the one thing international cricket has in its favour over most franchise leagues. It’s distinct. For one thing it has different formats and secondly the players are divvied-up in an entirely different way.

We’re not arguing that this is some kind of superpower that will halt the march of domestic T20 competitions in their tracks. We’re more highlighting it as a weakness of any T20 club league that isn’t the IPL. These competitions have no real unique selling point. They’re really just the same as the IPL, but less.

> Does the IPL deserve its reputation?

Subscribe to our email. You can always unsubscribe to it later. It’s no biggie. We won’t track you down and demand an explanation or anything. If you think we’ve the energy for that, just wait and see how few emails you get.

Chennai Super Kings (CSK) had a well-publicised very terrible IPL season. It’s interesting to see how they dealt with that.

CSK hold the records for most appearances in the play-offs (ten) and final (eight), but this year they were just about the worst team in the competition. This also makes them the most interesting team – particularly when it comes to the in-house social media “content” that the IPL teams all churn out.

IPL social media stuff is not supposed to be balanced. Every team is trying to say only one thing: “We are the best.”

So what on earth do you say when you are manifestly not the best? That is what we are going to look at today.

A week or so ago, CSK uploaded a video with the highly excellent title, “No Matter What, We Shall Play On.”

That is such a great title. What do you do if you can’t win? You just play on, don’t you? Pointlessly and miserably, you go through the motions and play on. CSK are at a point where that is all they have to celebrate.

The video gives us a unique glimpse into what life is like within a losing franchise.

Here are some of the great things that happen in it.

Sam Curran has a sad drink while red from the shins down

The drink is also red, so it seems safe to assume that it is going straight to his feet and if he keeps on drinking he will fully change colour and be able to chameleon his way out of difficult situations by clinging to the side of a London bus.

Imran Tahir gets a banana

Imran Tahir’s hair is out of control.

Imran Tahir considers a second banana

Imran Tahir is out of control.

Ravindra Jadeja enjoys a banana with Imran Tahir

Looks very much like someone is going to shout “peel” and then they are going to start peeling so that they can see who is quickest at peeling a banana.

Everybody for some reason plays football tennis for a bit

‘No matter what, we shall play on – only we’re going to play football tennis from now on because we’re so bad at cricket’.

A gargantuan nude Faf du Plessis signs full-size cricket bats with a massive sharpie

It’s the end of days.

The first and most important thing to acknowledge here is that we accurately predicted this result. We accurately predicted who would win the IPL using Ken Nordine’s word jazz album ‘Colors’.

Who needs complex data analysis which results in the groan-inducing use of the word ‘impactful’ when you could instead listen to some mad old fella from the Sixties rambling on about hues and draw your conclusions from that?

As far as the final itself goes, Mumbai Indians captain Rohit Sharma did as much as anyone to enliven the match.

He did two very exciting things.

Very Exciting Thing 1

The first and most obvious very exciting thing that Rohit did was repeatedly throw his ample weight into large shots.

“Ohhh that is a BIGGIE!” cried Mark Nicholas after one – and it was not immediately clear whether he meant the six or the batsman.

Very Exciting Thing 2

The second very exciting thing that Rohit did was gratuitously run out a team-mate when the sailing seemed altogether too plain for Mumbai Indians.

There is no time in a cricket match when this kind of thing is not both fun and funny.

Several people were keen to point out that, “there was never a run there,” but you have to say if Rohit Sharma has time to get almost to the other end and also do a bit of melodramatic ‘oh bollocks what have I done?’ mime then probably Suryakumar Yadav had time to cover 22 yards.

Committed mankaddist R Ashwin was bowling though, so maybe Yadav wasn’t backing up as cheatingly as he usually would.

If we could just ruin the ending of the sort-of-okay action film Braven for you, it climaxes with Jason Momoa throwing himself and the bad guy over a cliff but cleverly snagging his own foot in a bear trap tied to a tree so he doesn’t fall.

That’s the kind of death-or-glory, all-or-nothing move that makes for a dramatic finish. The cricket equivalent is having to hit a six off the final ball.

Cricket fantasies pretty much always involve winning off the final ball. Obviously you try and win before that, but the dream is to not quite manage it and instead end up in a position where you have to hit a last ball six.

Extrapolating from that, it’s even better to win a match by hitting the last two balls for six – which is exactly what Ravindra Jadeja did for Chennai Super Kings against Kolkata Knight Riders earlier this week.

It was very exciting and cool. But which was his best shot?

Here’s the thing: Jadeja didn’t actually need to hit a six off that final ball. He only needed a single. The fact that it was a six was therefore just garnish. Jadeja’s last ball six wasn’t necessary; it was just showboating.

So maybe the previous six was better? Well, not really, because he didn’t need to hit that six either. CSK needed seven off the final two balls, so he could have got the job done with a couple of fours instead.

This means that as far as ‘hitting the last two balls for six to win the match’ goes, this one was kind of gratuitous. We therefore put it to you that Jadeja’s best shot was actually neither of those sixes, nor the other one he hit earlier in his innings.

We put it to you, dear reader, that this next image captures Jadeja’s best shot, which was hit when CSK needed 14 runs off seven balls. Note in particular how the ball is in the air behind him.

This is a simply magnificent shot. The ones that Jadeja middled into the barren stands were great and all, but this one is flawless. This shot is a perfect example of the oeuvre, ‘massive great yahoo edged behind for four’.

Sixes are fun, but they’re most fun when there’s a bit of jeopardy about them. Clean hits that soar over the ropes are still thrilling, but they lack the frisson of possible disaster.

The ‘massive great yahoo edged behind for four’ has that quality in spades. Look at Jadeja’s head position. Look where he’s aiming. Look where the ball is.

No-one on the field has the faintest idea what is going on here. Tell us that’s not cricket at its best.

Public service announcement: The 90s XI v Now XI Test will quite possibly start on Monday. Sign up for our email for the daily reports.

At the start of the IPL, we tried to predict who would win based on what word-jazz artist Ken Nordine had said about the various team kit colours in his deep, resonant voice back in 1967.

Some of you may have felt that this was not a sensible way to predict a T20 league. WELL WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?

At the halfway stage, Mumbai Indians lead the IPL by zero points from Delhi Capitals.

Guess who we predicted would win the IPL?

That’s right, Mumbai Indians.

As Ken Nordine said: “On a Thursday of a year – who can remember except Blue – something sudden happened. Blue went as high as sky is high; flipped fathoms up; began to swing easy, sensibly, the way swings should be swung.”

It was very obvious that what Ken was saying here was that Mumbai Indians would lead the IPL at the halfway stage and would probably go on to become champions.

We also predicted that second-placed Delhi Capitals, “might win the thing,” on the basis that Ken said of azure that, “it can’t stand being same.”

We haven’t actually got time to cross check our other predictions against the current IPL table, but we’d say it’s 99% likely that they’re all exactly correct too.

We should probably investigate whether old Ken Nordine lyrics could help us achieve excellent results in other areas of our life.

The 2020 IPL is being played in the UAE. As far as we are aware, Mumbai Indians owner Nita Ambani is not in the UAE. This begs a question.

Is Nita Ambani still sucking life from her players through mandatory and dispiriting and unnecessary team bonding shit?

You know the stuff we mean. We wrote about it before. The “okay, gather round everybody, I just want to say a few words” stuff.

It mostly involves everyone standing there uncomfortably while Nita goes on and on and on. Occasionally it involves her forcing someone else to make some sort of speech against their will.

Well GREAT NEWS EVERYBODY. It still happens.

Unperturbed by being on the wrong continent, Nita literally phones it in now.

She phones some random member of staff and then their disembodied hand holds the phone aloft and everyone has to pay attention to it.

Like this:

This is Kieron Pollard getting congratulated on playing 150 games for Mumbai Indians.

Pollard is well used to this inhuman treatment by now so he manages the terrible situation with relative ease.

That image at the top of the page (which probably doesn’t show if you’re reading the email) is her making Anukul Roy “lead the cheer”.

Anukul Roy “leads the cheer” far more readily and vociferously than any sane person and so now we instantly dislike Anukul Roy and suspect him of being a simpleton.

We’ve finished watching Cricket Fever, Netflix’s documentary series about Mumbai Indians’ 2018 IPL campaign. It’s good, and personal experience revealed that even people who don’t especially like cricket may well enjoy it. It’s not a huge and revelatory experience or anything, but we’d say that people who don’t normally enjoy cricket things enjoying a cricket thing is a good result, so well done.

We’ve already given you our three big highlights from the first episode, but it only seems right to give you our overall series highlight as well.

By the end of the series, our very favourite thing was Lasith Malinga lurking in the background of every single scene like a highly conspicuous ghost.

Our second favourite thing

We’re not going to do a big list, but second place was Mitchell McClenaghan popping up behind Ishan Kishan in the pool and scaring him. This was mostly funny because it was Mitchell McClenaghan.

McClenaghan seems a nice guy, but he does have a slightly feral aura and we’ll never quite shake the impression we formed when we first saw him in this bonkers interview a few years ago. The joking-but-also-a-peek-at-a-darker-side screaming at 1m40s. The intimidatory throw at 3m12s. Just imagine that guy lurching up at you out of the water with his mad hair and insomniac eyes.

Why Malinga’s lurking

To explain the appeal of Malinga’s lurking, we first have to explain the format of the documentary.

The way it works is each episode they pick a player or two and interview them about their background so that you get to know them a bit. These tend to be the players who do well or have some sort of crisis in the match or matches that feature in that episode.

After a handful of episodes, we started really looking forward to the Lasith Malinga bit. Then it occurred to us that Malinga wasn’t actually playing, so we figured he was injured. Then we wondered whether he’d been injured for the entire season because we don’t log all of Lasith Malinga’s injuries because life’s too short.

Turns out Malinga wasn’t actually a Mumbai Indians player in 2018. They signed him as a bowling mentor.

But here’s the thing

Lasith Malinga is just about the greatest T20 bowler there’s ever been and he is also a very conspicuous person… but nobody ever mentions him. Not even once.

That’s weird. In a T20 documentary, when he’s right there in front of your eyes pretty much constantly, that’s really, massively, monumentally, jarringly super-ultra-weird.

It’s like he’s a ghost. It’s like he’s a highly visible, immediately recognisable ghost. And once you realise that he’s not going to get a personal background segment and isn’t really going to feature in any meaningful way, you start noticing him everywhere.

There he is standing listening to Nita Ambani drone on and on. There he is standing around with the coaches in the nets. He’s everywhere.

Our absolute favourite scene of all is one in the last episode where Mahela Jayawardene is sitting in a plastic chair discussing some player or other with a physio or one of the other coaches (Shane Bond has a definite Murray from Flight of the Conchords air about him, by the way).

Midway through the conversation, Malinga strolls over and sits down in another chair, right in front of them, right in the foreground of the shot. Rather than join in the conversation, he sticks to his lurking detail and just lolls there, occasionally grinning directly at the camera.

“Can you see him?!” you shout at Jayawardene. “Can you actually see him?! He’s right there. Right there in front of you. Is he a ghost? Why can’t you seem to see him? Won’t somebody please for the love of God interact with Lasith Malinga so that we can all be sure that he’s real.”

First published in April 2019.

Hey, why not sign up for our email and have this sort of vital reportage sent to your inbox?

If there’s a simple and obvious way of predicting the 2020 IPL that for some reason hasn’t yet been done, it’s this… We’re going to look at all of the team kits; we’re going to establish the main colour of each one; and then we’re going to listen to what Ken Nordine said about those colours on his 1966 “word jazz” album, Colors, to see what that says about each team.

If you don’t know Colors, have a listen. It’s mellow jazz over which this guy Ken Nordine talks about various different colours, imbuing each of them with a whole personality and character.

It’s fairly mad. It was initially commissioned by a paint company, but people liked what he did, so Ken turned it into an album.

He did tracks about 34 different colours and made some interesting selection decisions. Fuchsia, chartreuse and puce all feature, for example, while “red” was apparently too weird and niche to make the cut.

You might not exactly comprehend how all of this relates to the IPL, but all will become at least moderately clear if you read on.

Take it from us, this ‘predicting the IPL based on Ken Nordine’s Colors’ idea is a brilliant idea.

Royal Challengers Bangalore – ?

This ‘predicting the IPL based on Ken Nordine’s Colors’ idea is a terrible idea.

The main colour in RCB’s 2020 kit is dark blue. Tell you what colour Ken Nordine doesn’t cover? Dark blue.

Ken covers about a million different versions of purple (and good luck trying to define where one hue starts and another one ends) but he doesn’t do dark blue.

He does plain old blue – but Mumbai Indians’ blue is a bluer blue than Royal Challengers’ blue, so we’re saving that for them.

This means we’re going to have to deem Royal Challengers’ shade of blue, ‘black’. (We think this is okay. They used to wear quite a lot of black and it really is a very, very dark blue.)

Adding an additional layer of confusion, Ken begins his comments on black by referencing ‘a hole in Calcutta’ – a city which does of course have an entirely different IPL team. Not helpful, Ken. Not helpful at all.

Ken finishes by repeating the word ‘black’ in the style of Johnny Nice.

Somewhere in between, he says that black is “closing your eyes tight” and we’re sure you’ll agree that “closing your eyes tight” is not a good way to play cricket and so probably Royal Challengers Bangalore won’t do very well this year.

Prediction: Royal Challengers will finish last. Or at least they would if their kit were black. Which it isn’t.

Chennai Super Kings – Yellow

Yellow is a strange tale about, “when light was deciding who should be in and who should be out of the spectrum.”

According to Ken, green didn’t want yellow in, “which caused yellow to weep yellow tears for several eternals, before there were years.”

It works out well in the end, but it’s actually blue who sorts everything out.

Prediction: Fourth

Delhi Capitals – Azure

Delhi’s is a pale blue, so we’ve gone with azure.

“Azure is bored just being blue,” which has apparently led it to, “act sort of silly, like it’s at its wit’s end.”

Azure tries to be different “because it can’t stand being same.”

Prediction: Bit of a wildcard. Could finish last. Might win the thing.

Kings XI Punjab – Magenta

We’ve got Kings XI down as magenta purely on the basis it seems the closest colour on offer to a generic red. Having now seen footage of the 2020 kit, cerise actually seems like a better fit but we’ve already allocated that to Rajasthan Royals, so what are we gonna do?

It’s good news for Kings XI though because magenta, “has her own gossip column and almost the freedom to say almost anything.”

With the inside scoop on what lavender, fuchsia and russet are up to, we’re presuming magenta has decent intel on the other colours too, which has got to be an advantage.

Prediction: Runners-up. Knowledge is power.

Kolkata Knight Riders – Maroon

Maroon is darker than burgundy, we think, and KKR’s kit is quite dark.

Quite hard to interpret this one because Ken basically just lists a load of words that rhyme with ‘maroon’.

One of the words is ‘spittoon’ which is a word that cropped up in conversation the other day. Specifically, we were wondering whether they used to call them ‘gozzoons’ in the North-West of England.

Prediction: Um, fifth?

Mumbai Indians – Blue

This starts pretty much exactly as you’d imagine if you’ve seen Cricket Fever.

“Time was when blue was the saddest. Sadder than that. Blue was the bluest blue can be blue. No one seemed to care, least of all blue.”

Sounds grim, doesn’t it. But wait!

“But then on a Thursday of a year – who can remember except blue – something sudden happened. Blue went as high as sky is high; flipped fathoms up; began to swing easy, sensibly, the way swings should be swung.”

That DEFINITELY sounds good.

Prediction: Winners

Rajasthan Royals – Cerise

“Sorry to say, but cerise – according to a most indelible source who lives near hue – is out of it. True. Cerise is definitely out. About as out as out, the opposite of in. Don’t ask me why. It doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you.”

Prediction: Banned for spot-fixing or some other kind of corruption.

Sunrisers Hyderabad – Amber

Bit of a gradation, but we figure it averages out at amber.

Ken gives us a great deal of talk about “pure amber neutrality” in a piece that’s basically entirely about traffic lights.

There’s a faint hint of respect at amber’s significance in his reference to it as “the referee between red and green” but the broader sense you get is that Ken doesn’t really think an awful lot of amber.

Prediction: Seventh

Summary

Colour is a spectrum and our labels for particular colours are vague and ill-defined and therefore interpretations of colour differ from person to person. The only thing we can be certain of is that someone will win the IPL and that it will definitely be because of the colour of their kit. (Unless the tournament is abandoned halfway through because of coronavirus.)

If you choose to join the wonderful group of people who are currently funding King Cricket via Patreon, we will do more features like this. Should you see that as a good thing, you can flip us a shiny coin or buy us a pint each month here.

Yesterday we mentioned our grim office job at a company that was dying on its arse. It later occurred to us that Cricket Fever, the Netflix documentary about the Mumbai Indians, might be the reason why this particular slice of our working life had resurfaced uninvited in the ooze of our consciousness.

You wouldn’t think that over-pressured underpaid work in a tinpot digital marketing firm would have much in common with being a cricketing superstar, but let us assure you right now, it absolutely does. The reason is Nita Ambani.

Who are you again?

Tinpot web marketing firms have one major thing in common with soulless T20 franchises and that thing is eye-wateringly high staff turnover.

There are two main effects of this.

1. No-one really gives a flying full toss about their employer
2. Those in charge make extraordinary efforts to try and force their staff to care

A famously great way to fail to make people care about the team/firm that they work for is through team-building exercises.

Team-building

At our tinpot web marketing firm, team-building mostly involved heavy drinking. This doesn’t immediately sound so bad until you recall that we said it was a “sales-led company” with a “sales-led” culture. Heavy drinking basically just meant that eventually the police arrived because somebody or other had been accused of a sexual offence. (This one time every single member of our department decided that they didn’t want to go to a Friday afternoon party thing that had been organised to try and build morale and we all got into tremendous trouble for it. Ain’t no party like a mandatory party.)

At the Mumbai Indians, team-building exercises are considerably less sordid, but no less excruciatingly awkward.

In Cricket Fever, they have a treasure hunt around the Ambani home, while in a recent YouTube video, they play table tennis…

… play football…

… and do something-or-other with sticks.

But the real reason why the Mumbai Indians documentary reminds us of our time working for a tinpot web marketing company is because (a) there is an awful lot of losing and (b) every time that you lose, someone with a huge financial interest gives an earth-shatteringly dull and empty and long-winded speech and steals part of your life from you.

You know, this kind of thing.

This happens A LOT in Cricket Fever and having just trawled through the Mumbai Indians’ YouTube feed, it looks like there would have been plenty of pep talk footage on the cutting room floor too. You wonder how they find the time to practise cricket.

“Okay, gather round everybody. I just want to say a few words.”

It’s usually Nita. She says things like, “I don’t think there is a word called ‘impossible’ in the language of the Mumbai Indians,” and she talks about the franchise’s legacy, and what it stands for, and how they’re all a family.

Most of all she just goes on and on and on. They’re speeches with no direction, no point, and you just have to sit there and listen to her as she eats away more and more of the short and precious time you have on this Earth.

In one recent video, she says the man of the match award, “belongs to each and every one of you. All of y’all who played and all of y’all who watched the match.”

Imagine being Jasprit Bumrah listening to that shit. You’ve just taken 3-20 off four overs. You’re the actual man of the match and Nita Ambani swans in and says you have to share the award with Pankaj Jaiswal because he did a really good job of watching.

Unreal.

In another video, Nita hands out “badges of honour” and Yuvraj Singh – Yuvraj Singh, a man who’s won the actual World Cup – has to go and collect one of them.

And then. And then! He has to “say a word” about being the guy who had to go and collect a badge. Model professional that he is, Yuvraj phones it in. He says the team has to “take the positives” and that “it’s important to be together and be positive.”

Then everyone claps him while Kieron Pollard looks bored and checks his phone.

First published in April 2019.

The finisher. Captain cool. There he was missing the ball and losing his team the match.

It’s funny how things are presented. Had it been the World Cup and had MS Dhoni been born 8,000km to the south-west, the headlines would all have been about what a massive choker he is.

As it was, it was the IPL and Dhoni’s from India, so he instead got quite a lot of credit for some (but not all) of what had preceded the crucial final delivery against Royal Challengers Bangalore.

We’ve written about Dhoni’s almost-but-not-actually successful run-chase for Chennai Super Kings for Cricket 365. You should read it.