During last year’s IPL season, the Chinnaswamy Stadium, home of Vijay Mallya’s Royal Challengers Bangalore, was graced by the presence of the F1 car of Mallya’s Force India outfit. Like the car, Bangalore’s batsmen lagged well behind the competition, travelling at a sedate pace.

From the moment that Wasim Jaffer and captain Rahul Dravid walked out to the middle for the first match of the season against Kolkata Knight Riders in front of the packed home crowd and the Force India machine, Bangalore were destined to be left behind. Reinforced by Jacques Kallis and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the Karnataka-based outfit’s batsmen were never going to fire up in the high-octane format.

Their run rate was by far the worst in the competition, and but for a three-run win over the Deccan Chargers, Bangalore would have finished last.

Aside from the magnitude of the results, Bangalore’s archaic approach to the task at hand was truly staggering. In addition to the plethora of batsmen who played in a manner reminiscent of Test players of a bygone era, the squad was filled with aging outfielders incapable of threatening the opposition batsmen. With the likes of Anil Kumble, Dravid and Kallis patrolling the circle, Bangalore were never going to worry their foes inside the ring; apart from Virat Kohli and Cameron White, all of their fielders were below average for the needs of T20.

Leading the dinosaur procession were none other than the two giants, the two symbols of Karnataka cricket: Dravid and Kumble. The pair played as though they had lived their entire careers in the 1960s and were transported forward by a time machine, and never looked like adapting to the fluidity of the modern game. Meanwhile, the team management seemed in a trance, unwilling to make any bold moves to rectify the situation.

In between IPL seasons, Force India outfit went through an even worse time, as the F1 season carried on through 2008. In the most ruthless, political and money-driven of sports, where every regulation is bent at every possible opportunity, Mallya’s drivers failed to score a single point. Force India were regularly two seconds a lap slower, sometimes more, than the front runners, and scraped into the top ten only once.

If any sport is going to engender the ruthlessness that is needed at the top level, it would be F1, which moves like no other. Such is the pace of development that even the most ineffective of the minnows will be faster than Ferrari and McLaren were just 18-24 months earlier.

Judging by the progress of his teams in the past month, Mallya appears to have been hardened by his first year in international sport. Last week, Force India surpassed their best result in the first race of the new season, and were only 1.5 seconds slower than the frontrunners in qualifying. Early in the race, they were able to withstand the pressure from faster cars that were seeking to overtake them.

On the home front, Mallya certainly appears to have become more hard-nosed. The dour and unenterprising Dravid has been removed as captain and replaced by Kevin Pietersen. Although Dravid’s absence for the entire has been passed off as a family matter (his wife being pregnant), few would be gullible enough to believe that Dravid would voluntarily miss an entire season of such a lucrative tournament, especially as his overseas travel has been greatly reduced in the last two years by his omission from the ODI squad.

Mallya’s move is necessary if Bangalore want to keep pace with the front-runners. For too long, Indian cricket administrators have been reluctant to do away with senior players who no longer merit the positions they earned in their halcyon days. Sourav Ganguly famously went on and on until the bitter confrontation with Greg Chappell, while Kumble became increasingly irrelevant in his final year of Test cricket. Little wonder that there was a marked improvement in the team performance when MS Dhoni filled in and then took over from Kumble, and when Ganguly was omitted from the team until he regained it through merit. It seems that with the multiple-captains policy, Kolkata may be setting out a similar path in an attempt to ease out Ganguly.

With ever-increasing financial stakes riding on the success of the franchises, merit will loom ever larger when Indian administrators select their personnel. And not before time either. At least that will be one major improvement amid the increasingly ostentatious cricketing landscape of our time
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