The First Over Was a Maiden

NEWS / The First Over Was a Maiden

The Indian Premier League started with a maiden.

18 April 2008, M. Chinnaswamy Stadium. Lasers, cheerleaders, a new league that still sounded like a sales pitch. Rahul Dravid won the toss for Royal Challengers Bangalore and asked Kolkata Knight Riders to bat. Sourav Ganguly walked out with Brendon McCullum, 26, New Zealand’s wicketkeeper, who had been hitting the ball hard at home and had not been hitting it at all in his last few T20 internationals. Chris Gayle was supposed to open for Kolkata. He was not there. McCullum was.

Praveen Kumar bowled the first over of the competition. Six balls. No run. For those six deliveries the new product looked like every other T20 that had already been tried. Zaheer Khan came on next. A flick. A pull. Then a miscue that should have died at third man and instead went for six. Four balls later McCullum had 18. The innings people still quote did not arrive fully formed. It tripped.

Ganguly made 10 and was caught by Jacques Kallis off Zaheer. Ricky Ponting, hired as a name, made 20 off 20. David Hussey made 12. The rest of the specialist batting is a reminder that 158 not out off 73 is a lonely number. Ten fours. Thirteen sixes. Strike-rate 216. Kolkata 222 for 3. ESPNcricinfo’s bulletin the same night called it a one-man assault. The scorecard agrees.

His fifty took 32 balls. The hundred took 53. The last fifty took 17. Cameron White, who held the previous T20 record of 141, was given one over in the 15th to stop it and went for two sixes and a four. McCullum moved to 99. A cover drive for two brought the hundred. In the 17th he paddle-swept Zaheer for six. He took 39 off his last eleven balls, five of them sixes. Praveen, who had escaped most of the evening, was hit over midwicket with the first two balls of the last over. The last ball of the innings went over long-on.

Bangalore were bowled out for 82 in 15.1 overs. Praveen, with 18, was their top scorer. Ajit Agarkar took 3 for 25. The margin was 140 runs, still among the heaviest beatings in the tournament’s history. McCullum’s 158* was then the highest individual score in Twenty20 cricket. It stayed that way until Chris Gayle made 175* in 2013, also at this ground.

Years later McCullum said he had not known, walking out, where a run was going to come from. He said Ganguly told him that night his life had changed forever, and that he had not understood it then. He also said he had not thought he had an innings like that in him. Those are his sentences. They sit next to a first over that scored nothing.

ESPNcricinfo on McCullum’s 158 not out, the innings that opened the IPL. If the player does not load, open it on YouTube.

Watch McCullum 158* on YouTube ↗

The league needed a first night that was cricket, not only lights. He gave it that. He also gave it six dots. Both things are on the same card.