We had missed watching the grand opening ceremony of the IPL 2025 at the Eden Gardens, as we had a morning flight to catch from Niagara Falls to Washington DC.
But over a sumptuous Nepali dinner on a chilly evening, our cricket-fanatic family were busy ‘Googling’ the new lineups and captains of the 10 franchises, as the mega auctions of 2025 had shaken things up a fair bit.
By the time our dessert platter was served, everyone had placed their bets on their favourite franchises. Out of the seven of us, four had once again placed their dollar on the Royal Challengers Bengaluru, (RCB) given their domicile and their love for Virat Kohli. One had finally gotten tired of RCB’s 17 heartbreaking campaigns and decided to root for Rohit Sharma and his unit, while another decided to be neutral and support “good cricket”.
My loyalties have always been with the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) and the Mumbai Indians (MI), and on our Uber ride back, I immersed myself into ESPN Cricinfo’s StatsGuru tool, to deep dive into the careers of new-age, exciting talents like Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Ramandeep Singh, Mayanak Markande, Naman Dhir, Vignesh Puthur, Robin Minz and Shrijith Krishnan.
Every season, one is keen and hopeful that a couple of such young, uncapped players will capitalise on the platform to launch them into the international scene.
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Upon reaching our AirBnB, I drowned myself in my timeline on X to satiate my craving for interesting data analysing different performance parameters of the different franchises. @ErikaMorris79’s thread captivated my attention for an hour as it fed me data starting from the average age and composition of the new squads to their averages, strike-rates, economies and recent team performances.
As per the charts, the data objectively sighted Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) as clear favourites, followed by the Mumbai Indians (MI) and the Rajasthan Royals (RR). I was glad that data science was backing one of my favourite teams to go all the way once again.
Before we hit the sack, the family collectively enjoyed a couple of Youtube videos from Harsha Bhogle about why and how the IPL has been a ‘Big Game Changer’, and some of the key things he was looking forward to in the 18th edition of the IPL.
We peppered those 8-minute videos with a few quick ‘Shorts’ reliving some of our favourite IPL moments featuring MS Dhoni, Hardik Pandya, Ravichandran Ashwin, Sachin Tendulkar, and our every own RevSportz channel that educated us about the two new rules for IPL 2025 and how KKR’s Venkatesh Iyer describes the perfect IPL player.
Despite being on the road and 12,500 km away from Kolkata, which was about to host the epic IPL opener in a few hours, thanks to Google, StatsGuru, X and YouTube, we felt all set for the 74-match cricket mania spread across 65 days.
By the time we landed in Washington, our Facebook feed was full of photos of Shah Rukh Khan and Kohli dancing their hearts out at the opening ceremony and reels on Instagram entertained us with Shreya Ghoshal’s melodious renditions of the 10 songs she sang to welcome the ten franchises to the tournament.
One of the biggest pet peeves for overseas and traveling IPL fans has been to find a good and reliable stream to enjoy the live games, and for us in the US, a paid subscription on Procricket.tv came to our rescue. Not only was the stream quality good, but the latency was also rather low and one had the option of switching between English and Hindi commentary.
With screen mirroring on, we were set for the first half of our Saturday in Washington DC, enjoying a high-scoring thriller between RCB and KKR, the two franchises that had kickstarted the IPL in 2008 and have had steady backers in our family.
Ajinkya Rahane, Sunil Narine and Raghuvanshi had me celebrating in the first hour before Krunal Pandya broke the back of KKR’s innings. Then, Kohli, Phil Salt and Rajat Patidar made the chase look like a cakewalk to reverse RCB’s track record against the defending champions.
Clearly, the majority of the folks in my family were celebrating this win and Kohli’s success and while I was recuperating, to cool things off, my jubilant son played the hilarious Dream 11 “Aamir ne liya panga” ad on Youtube, which by now has been viewed nearly 200 million times.
We had missed creating our fantasy teams at this point and we rushed to do it on IPLT20.com as many of us non-resident Indians couldn’t avail the facility on Dream11 – this should keep the family banter on our Whatsapp group going even after we disperse to our respective homes in a week’s time.
Post-lunch, as the family was drawing up plans to visit Capitol Hill, World War II and Lincoln Memorials, the entrepreneur and marketer in me immersed myself in some fascinating long reads about the second largest sporting league (on a per-match basis) in the world – the one by Rahul Chaudhary in The Ken about the low or no correlation between a franchise’s on-field success and their commercial fortunes was an eye-opener.
What caught my attention further was the podcast episode on the same platform that reported about how three days before the launch of IPL 2025, three of the country’s largest ad agencies were raided over alleged price-fixing and cartelization.
Whilst unnerving, it was also a reminder that beyond the cricket, it is these garnishes of ‘mirch-masala’ that keep our nation, and the world, interested in this enterprise called the Indian Premier League.
And the ecosystem of social media feeds, podcasts, fantasy leagues, long and short-form videos, OTT streaming apps, data analytics trackers and good old sports journalism provides foreigners, non-residents and traveling IPL fans ample opportunity to soak in and enjoy this extravaganza, beyond the core broadcast viewer base of 550 million.
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