Along with the excitement, there were also a few murmurs of discontent.
After reaching the Indian Premier League (IPL) final in 2016, on the back of 973 runs from Virat Kohli’s bat, Royal Challengers Bangalore had a miserable time of it in 2017. On a re-laid pitch at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, they won just one of seven home games. Away from the field, KL Rahul, a Karnataka and India stalwart who had contributed handsomely to the 2016 run before missing the last season injured, was let go while Sarfaraz Khan had been retained at considerable cost.
As we waited in line for security check at the turnstile, the two boys in front of me could talk of little else. “Why Sarfaraz?” asked one. “Three Karnataka players in their [Kings XI Punjab] top order,” replied his friend, also name-checking Karun Nair and Mayank Agarwal. Nair made a Test triple-hundred against England in December 2016, while Agarwal enjoyed a stellar domestic season. But like Rahul, they can only get a game 2000km from home.
Sure enough, when Punjab were sent in to bat, it was Rahul and Agarwal that opened and the initial flurry of strokes had plenty of fans nursing mixed feelings. Some cheered openly as Rahul went after the bowling, while others found their voice only once Umesh Yadav, complete with man-bun, took three wickets in an over to derail the innings.
The signage everywhere at the stadium advised you to Play Bold, but there was more than a note of circumspection in the way Bangalore went about chasing a modest target. But the beauty of the IPL also lies in the regularity with which it throws up new stars, and one such moment encapsulated that.
Mujeeb Zadran, who was playing for the Afghanistan Under-19s a couple of months ago, produced a marvelous back-of-the-hand googly to flummox Virat Kohli. Dozens in the posh seats next to the press box rose as one, presumably to applaud the skill involved in the dismissal as much as to acknowledge their captain.
In one of the VIP enclosures next to the dressing rooms, Anushka Sharma, Kohli’s wife, watched glumly. The couple met while shooting for a shampoo commercial five years ago, and her mood certainly wouldn’t have improved if she’d known that Kohli’s dismissal prompted a new anti-dandruff ad on television. The trolls certainly didn’t miss it.
His exit, however, marked the resumption of one of the great IPL love affairs. AB de Villiers may have his roots in Pretoria, but into his eighth season in the red-and-black of Bangalore, he’s venerated as a local hero. Even as he started slowly, the fans didn’t panic. They just knew what was coming.
De Villiers, not a man known for making grand gestures, had already asked the fans to make the Chinnaswamy “our fortress” again. “I have grown to love the place … the atmosphere, the history and, more than anything, the supporters who fill the grandstands every time RCB take the field,” he wrote in a newspaper column. When he smacked two sixes off the hitherto impeccable Zadran to more or less seal the game, the roars that he had asked for duly arrived.
There was still time for one final twist. With de Villiers out, the 18-year-old Washington Sundar had the responsibility of seeing the team home. Sundar is a Chennai boy, and the dismal events that forced Chennai Super Kings to relocate their home matches to Pune have also forced the Indian board to reassess whether Bangalore can host its home game against Chennai.
So rabid are the fringe elements on either side that a flare-up is more than likely, but such nonsense was momentarily forgotten as Sundar, the calmest person on the ground, struck two fours to win the game. A stadium largely full of Bangaloreans rose to acclaim the Chennai boy, just to remind us that sport often has the power to surmount the petty barriers we erect between us. The serenading of an Afrikaner from Pretoria and a young man on the other side of the Cauvery-water divide was a pleasant distraction from the ugliness all around.