The IPL franchise has branched out into remote Surrey and this is the kind of development English cricket will have to accept as the game continues to evolve

Just a month to go, then, until the beginning of the end. Or the start of the beginning. Or something like that anyway. The last week in October will see English cricket’s inaugural draft, a first bolt of lightning shot through the Hundred’s shell-company teams. Unbidden, unprecedented, not to mention rootless and entirely commercial in nature; the franchises are coming. Not that this is completely new. Look hard enough and they’re already here.

Rewind to early August and down a winding lane, through a patch of woodland, in the middle of a new-build timber hangar a few miles off the A3, Jaydev Unadkat is trying to teach a nervous-looking 13-year-old left-arm seamer how to stop dragging his line down outside leg stump by lifting his front arm a little higher.

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“The front arm is your radar,” Unadkat says, urging his charge to try it right now in front of 30 or so academy mates, plus assembled coaches, camera crew and the watching throng on the balcony.

The nervous-looking seamer bites his lip, runs in, elevates his front arm and pings off stump out of its slot with a satisfying clank, just about concealing the flush of delighted relief as he strolls down to retrieve his ball.

The coaches nod. Training ticks on. Unadkat, who has played Test cricket for India and was the most expensive Indian player at last year’s Indian Premier League auction, attends to some other pace bowling detail. And the only really puzzling thing about any of this is the fact everyone present is wearing the bright pink shirt of the Rajasthan Royals of Jaipur.

The Royals have always positioned themselves as a hub for English IPL interests. From the start this most moneyball-ish of franchises has had a sprinkling of English players, from early Shane Warne-sourced adoptees Dimitri Mascherenas and Michael Lumb to the current A-list tier of Ben Stokes, Jofra Archer and Jos Buttler.

The academy is something new. The following weekend these junior Royals will play Hampshire Under-15s at the Ageas Bowl, part of an ever-thickening round of county and touring fixtures. Even Unadkat is here on serious business, a training trip that will see him work with the bowling fitness guru and Royals consultant Steffan Jones.

The part-owner Manoj Badale is agreeably open about all this. The goal of the Royals in England isn’t just to build the brand (as ever those outside English sport’s traditions speak with genuine pride about their sporting brands). It is to create a concrete cricketing presence, to foster the dream of a direct pathway from English grassroots to cricket’s most glam-laden stage.

“Of course we’d love to see that happen,” Badale says. “We will also be happy if the academy continues to launch players in the county circuit, who then become England stars of the future.”

Sounds fanciful? A few weeks after the Hampshire game Sid Lahiri, the mercurial head of the Royals’ UK academy, is still talking about a shot played by one hugely talented 13- year-old in Royals colours – a ramp-swept one-bounce four off an opening bowler – that seems to suggest the sky might indeed be the limit.

“A hundred percent it is the ultimate dream to go and play for Rajasthan Royals,” Lahiri says. “I am sure that will happen. The talent pool is there. If you look at the English kids we are coaching I would be surprised if we don’t see at least one of them in the Rajasthan Royals colours in a few years.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shane Warne oversees a net session in Cobham. Photograph: Luke Walker/Getty Images for Rajasthan Royals

Lahiri is a fascinating figure in his own right. He came to England in 2003 to take his coaching badges at the end of some slightly frustrating travels around the domestic scene in India. “I knew nobody, had no clue, nobody knew who I was. I started with one boy. I had nothing. Just us at the park.”

Eventually his time playing at Stoke D’Abernon, teaching cricket at Parkside school, and a generous cash gift from one very grateful and very wealthy parent – Lahiri bought four bowling machines with the money – led to the creation of Star Cricket Academy. At which point a bloom of young Surrey talent rolled in through the door. Lahiri coached Ollie Pope from the age of seven (“even then his ability to learn was mind-blowing”) as well as Ryan Patel, Amir Virdi and others.

In 2019 his setup at Reeds School was rolled up into Rajasthan Royals’ UK academy, a tie-in that has its roots in Lahiri’s long-standing relationship with Zubin Bharucha, now the Royals’ head of cricket.

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If there is still an air of double-take about all this, a sense of a punt, an entrepreneurial gamble, it is worth remembering the IPL is in itself a punt, albeit one that has from a standing start become the ninth most watched league in world sport.

Why have the Rajasthan Royals opened an academy in England? For the same reason Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United have academies in every major sporting nation in the world, outriders of football’s steamrollering cultural ascent.

As Badale says: “We were attracted to the UK as a market due to our existing fanbase here, our three English stars [Ben, Jofra and Jos] and the fact we have a deep network in this country.” There will be a temptation to shrug at this, to tut at the suggestion the Royals might make a dent in English cricket culture.

But then English cricket has a history of missing the top line with India, Twenty20 and shifting tectonic plates. Like it or not the IPL is an expansionist force. It has to grow, has to stretch its tentacles. The franchise system offers this. A franchise, unlike a country, can be marketed and finessed as a brand, ranked on a scale of nought to Real Madrid or the Dallas Cowboys.

There has already been talk of IPL franchises expanding via merger and acquisitions into the leagues of other countries. The Rajasthan Royals enter the Hundred: it won’t happen in any version of the future that doesn’t involve the cricketing public marching on ECB HQ brandishing pitchforks and lighted torches.

For now the IPL will content itself with talk of fan parks, with an expansionist broadcast strategy (up significantly in the UK in the last two years) and with its seed planted in deepest Surrey.

Something will grow here. It might be a tranche of fast-tracked English-born IPL players. Or simply a sense that the wild, aggressively entrepreneurial spirit of big sport, with all its collateral damage and brutal modernity, might just be the way to grow this cobwebbed old summer game in whatever direction it can find.

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