IPL Day Eight - The Deccan Charge

Mr Modi’s continuing inability to bring the unruly heavens to heel is threatening to undermine this tournament just as it gets going. The Supreme Lalit wakes up in his penthouse hotel suite in Cape Town to find it has been raining all night. He goes out onto the balcony in his IPL pyjamas and has a few strong words with the errant clouds. The rain abates. His Modiness goes back inside to organise his executive breakfast. Immediately it begins to drizzle again. He simply can’t be everywhere. (And he certainly can’t be in Rajasthan right now, where the heavy black clouds of justice are amassing particularly ominously.)

So our evening entertainment was cut short by a soggy square that bubbled up water every time Robin Jackman pressed his big foot into it. Meanwhile, the sun beats down on the streets of Blighty. Here we are with perfect weather and only county cricket to play it in. Frankly, it is wasted on us. We don’t need it and we don’t know what to do with it, whereas dampness fits snugly around the four day game like a familiar old cardigan.

But having already pocketed a day’s entertainment it is perhaps a little churlish to complain about the abandonment of the night’s festivities. This afternoon it was the blue derby, the azure tussle. It was the craft, guile and high technology of Mumbai, their shirts the colour of summer skies, pitted against the grimy heavy industry of Hyderabad, their pyjamas the shade of a mechanic’s overalls after a busy day spent nostril deep in oil and soot.

Deccan prevailed and the consensus on television was that they wanted it more. This is lazy thinking. When the game is heading inexorably in one direction, body language is not a fair guide to the relative merits of the two teams. The losers-elect will appear to be sullen, stiff of limb and unconvincing, whilst the winners zip about the field in pursuit of the fruits of victory. As the last ball was tamely popped into the onside by Zaheer, the Deccan hordes flooded the pitch and piled into a celebratory scrum. Mumbai would probably have done the same.

Still there is something inexorable about Deccan’s progress. They are the epitome of no-nonsense. There are no flashing white teeth, no fancy haircuts and not even a whiff of Hollywood. The bowlers are crane operators, the batsmen panel beaters and everybody fields with the finely drilled efficiency of a Formula One pit team. From RP Singh’s manfully hairy chest to Venugopal Rao’s unfeasibly hairy face, they are the epitome of function over appearance, led by the Jimmy Stewart of world cricket. For me the story of the afternoon was summed up in one television image. It was of Harmeet Singh trotting up to bowl, the gleam of honest toil on his brow as he peered bravely into the sun, into the blazing brilliance of Sachin.

That isn’t to suggest that Deccan are all endeavour and no class. Their heavy machinery was assembled at considerable expense and their main men more than matched their pale blue opponents for gravitas and reputation. Everywhere there were heavyweight clashes, as though several boxing divisions were being unified at once. We had Malinga versus Gibbs; Gilchrist versus Zaheer; Jayasuriya facing Edwards and RP Singh fronting up against Tendulkar. Both had golden-armed spinners. Both had lithe, versatile West Indian allrounders.

Where they differed was in their batting manner, their modus operandi. Deccan, you imagine, have been drilled in the virtues of ensuring the pigeon they’ve got hold of by one leg is safely bagged, plucked and in the pot as quickly as possible. Mumbai on the other hand are content to let it go, confident that their skill and experience will enable them to snaffle the brace of pheasants that are sure to be hiding in the nearby shrubbery.

So it was that Gibbs and Gilchrist lashed, slashed, dashed and earned themselves large portions of Luck Pie, but didn’t stop swinging. Had Mumbai unleashed their inner Deccan, the moderate total they were chasing might have been scaled down to puny proportions. Instead, they were patient, sedate, nurturing momentum, but never quite ahead of the game. It left them vulnerable to Dame Misfortune, who duly turned up like an unwanted aunt, after the strategy break. Gilchrist roared the departure of Tendulkar and from that point on, Mumbai’s faith in craft, judgement and pure science proved insufficient to withstand the Charge.

The human brain is an unreliable recorder, for all that it operates in HD and 3D. Often all we can recall after a day’s play are unrelated, random moments, from which we have to reconstruct events. In Test matches, these moments are spaced out clearly and framed like pictures in an art gallery. In Twenty20, they are jumbled up like flashbacks to a chaotic night at a drunken club.

I can recall Gibbs bouncing the white ball off his thigh, juggling it like a footballer, looking as relaxed as a lottery winner on a Caribbean cruise. But I can’t remember who gave him the catch. There was the sudden appeareance of the statesmanlike profile of VVS Laxman gliding fleetingly into shot, having presumably just returned from his holidays. I don’t remember any of the twenty runs Harbhajan clattered from eight balls, but I do recall smiling at his arrival, as I usually do. And I smiled too at the dedication of the man furiously banging his little cymbals together for Mumbai. Unfortunately the delicate tinkling could not be heard above the Hyderabad roar.

Finally, just to underline that Deccan might be an irony free zone, it emerged that they had an American baseball coach working with them. He was duly wired up to commentary central and Harsha Bogle gave him a typically over-the-top billing as The Man Who Had Revolutionised Fielding. “Thank you very much,” he replied, with a lack of modesty that might even have caused Geoffrey Boycott to blush. There are lots of foreigners in the IPL, but none are quite so foreign as Americans.