Six appeal: On IPL and the era of boundary hunters

IN A DIFFERENT LEAGUE

- Kunal Pradhan

The first murmurs of the trend began about 18 years ago. Batting coaches I knew in Delhi and Mumbai started talking about how they were facing a strange conundrum: fathers and mothers protesting that too much time ‘was being spent teaching their children how to play defence instead of how to hit fours and sixes. “That's like wanting to run before you can walk,” the coaches would laugh.

This was in the early years of the Indian Premier League (IPL), when the gavel at the auction was turning more heads than the fireworks on the ground. As young second-string Indian players started getting snapped up for tens of lakhs of rupees — something unheard of in domestic cricket until then — the viability of cricket as a profession that could support more than just the 15 superstars who made it to the Indian team started to reveal itself.

Six-hitters was what IPL needed, so six-hitters was what people wanted their kids to become. And since the customer is always right, a fundamental shift began to occur. All these years later, say hello to Vaibhav Sooryavanshi.

Rinse and repeat

My first brush with IPL was at the inaugural match in 2008. On a frantic night at the Chinnaswamy stadium, the home side Royal Challengers Bengaluru were pulverised by Kolkata Knight Riders courtesy a display of outrageous power hitting by Brendon McCullum. I remember instantly disliking the format, and as I watched more matches during that first season, the aversion grew.