“Losing a few games in the IPL is highly pressured in normal times, but in bio-bubbles there is no escape from those pressures.” - Paddy Upton
Telford Vice | Cape Town
PADDY Upton once disarmed a knife-wielding gangster by hugging him. So maybe he has earned the right to sound glib about dodging a bullet. Or, as he said this week, “I was happy to not be cooped up in a hotel room for two-and-a-half months.”
Upton was an IPL head coach with either the Pune Warriors, the Rajasthan Royals or the Delhi Daredevils from 2012 to 2017, and again with Rajasthan in 2019. Last year he served as the Royals’ strength and conditioning expert. But he was not involved this year, and for that he considers himself fortunate.
Covid-19 forced the tournament’s indefinite suspension on Tuesday with fewer than half of the scheduled 60 games played. As catastrophic as that is for cricket, it’s little more than a footnote in India’s steadily more serious struggle with the virus, which has infected more than 21,9-million people there and claimed upwards of 238,000 deaths.
Upton is not oblivious to the disturbing situation in a country he respects and loves — he had been married, to a fellow South African, in a traditional Vedic ceremony on an Ashram in India by the time he helped MS Dhoni’s team win the 2011 World Cup — but the fate of the 2021 IPL isn’t why he is relieved to be at home in Cape Town.
Rather, the prospect of navigating, for weeks on end, the intensity generated by being too close for comfort to the stresses and strains that befall elite cricketers was too much to countenance even for a coach who has made a career out of doing things differently. In short, the bio-bubbles that allow even events as big as the IPL to go ahead despite the pandemic, albeit in a pared down form, breed their own maladies.
“There is a marked difference in experience between being on a winning versus a losing streak,” Upton said. “Losing a few games in the IPL is highly pressured in normal times, but in bio-bubbles there is no escape from those pressures.
“Even though, historically, teams that go on to win are teams that find form in the second half, owners, management and even players themselves tend to have unnecessary emotional overreactions to losing a few games in the first half,” Upton said. “While there’s nothing wrong with losing games early on, the pressure that is placed on coaching staffs makes it even more difficult to come back from this space.”
That can make even the coolest customers feel the heat, especially given the IPL’s busy playing schedule. Sunrisers Hyderabad are a case in point. They are captained by Kane Williamson and coached by Trevor Bayliss — two of the most highly regarded figures in those roles in world cricket — and they have players of the calibre of Jonny Bairstow, Jason Holder, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Rashid Khan, Jason Roy and Wriddhiman Saha. But they have lost six of their seven games in the IPL this year. They wouldn’t be human if news of the suspension wasn’t welcomed with relief in their dressingroom. By contrast the Delhi Capitals, who have won six of their eight matches and lead the standings, are no doubt frustrated that their momentum has been snuffed out.
What we can’t see from those divergent records — for instance, how squads have adapted to bubble life — might explain them. “The other key factor is the quality of the team culture and environment,” Upton said. “Bio-bubbles in a really good team culture and environment are way easier and more manageable than in teams that don’t have a solid culture or that have any toxicity within the environment.”
That’s not to say Williamson and Bayliss are stoking a toxic culture. But at a time when people are thinking twice about hugging their best friend, who could be as dangerous to their health as a knife-wielding gangster, it’s not difficult to understand how being part of a cricket team stuck in a bubble is an exercise in alienation. And why people like Upton count themselves lucky not to have been part of the 2021 IPL.
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