Introduction Mohammed Shami’s 2024 IPL return was not just a sporting comeback. It was the conclusion of a two-year period during which he had dealt with significant personal difficulties — a publicised and acrimonious marital dispute, a heel surgery that kept him out of cricket for months, and the pressure of returning to bowling at...
Introduction The Rising Pune Supergiant had two years to exist. In those two years, they changed captains mid-season, hired and fired coaching staff, came within one run of winning the IPL title, and provided cricket with some of the best raw material for drama that the competition has ever produced. They played in only 2...
Introduction There is a puzzle at the heart of Ben Stokes’ cricket career. In Test cricket, he is the best allrounder in the world — the man who single-handedly won England matches that were statistically already lost, who scores runs when nothing seems possible and takes wickets when pitches refuse to assist. In the IPL,...
Introduction In sport, coaches rarely last. The nature of competitive franchises is to move quickly — one bad season can cost a coach their job, regardless of what came before. And then there is Stephen Fleming: the former New Zealand captain who became head coach of Chennai Super Kings in the IPL’s very first season...
Introduction In 2014, Andre Russell was a useful T20 allrounder — quick, hard-hitting, someone who could win 20% of the matches he played almost by himself. By 2019, he had evolved into something that the sport had never quite seen before: a batsman capable of adding 50 runs in three overs, who genuinely could win...
Introduction David Warner’s fall from grace in 2018 was as public and as brutal as any sporting scandal in cricket history. The sandpaper affair in South Africa — where Warner, along with Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft, was found to have been involved in ball-tampering — cost him a one-year ban from all cricket, the...
Introduction Suresh Raina was called Mr. IPL for years — a nickname that acknowledged what the statistics confirmed: he was the most consistent run-scorer in the competition’s first decade, appearing in more matches than almost anyone else, rarely having a bad season, and performing in finals as reliably as he performed in league matches. He...
Introduction Before Lasith Malinga, T20 death bowling was simple: you bowled short, you bowled wide, you hoped the batter made a mistake. After Malinga, everything changed. The Sri Lankan fast bowler’s unique round-arm, slinging action — combined with the most precise yorker in cricket history — established a template for how to bowl in T20 cricket’s final...
Introduction Some franchise cricket stories are about glory won or squandered. The Kochi Tuskers Kerala story is about none of those things. It is about how a franchise that played exactly one season of IPL cricket, finished seventh out of ten teams, and was then terminated by the cricket board it was playing under, went to arbitration...
Introduction The story of Deccan Chargers’ 2009 IPL title is well known. What is less known is how close the franchise came to making completely different decisions — decisions that might have meant no title, no Gilchrist captaincy, and a very different franchise history. The auction strategies, the players nearly signed instead, and the internal discussions that shaped the...