Eleven Cadogan Gardens has been described as “Chelsea’s best-kept secret”. It could also be cricket’s best-kept secret, too, for it was at this exclusive, chic hotel on Sloane Street that the Indian Premier League was born and a sport was changed forever.
It was over tea in the hotel’s restaurant in July 2007, and not at the Wimbledon Championships as has been widely reported, that Lalit Modi and Andrew Wildblood, a senior vice-president at IMG, began to seriously piece together plans for a new Twenty20 cricket league in India.
Modi had attempted something similar before and Wildblood had been selling cricket rights into India for more than 15 years so both knew the potential would be enormous...