Down memory lane

Brendon McCullum stands at the boundary’s edge at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, casting his mind back to the inaugural game of the IPL.

It is nearly 10 years to the day he helped usher in the world’s richest, shiniest cricket tournament at this very ground with a hailstorm of sixes and an innings no one is likely to forget. “It’s gone so fast, it is hard to imagine it was 10 years ago,” he says.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen and how the tournament was going to unfold. That 158 (for KKR vs RCB) — it’s not normal to do that. For the first few years, it took me a while to deal with the expectation of that — not just from other people but myself as well — and to realise that that was one of those days that does not come very often.”

McCullum has been a part of the IPL every one of these 11 editions, but his approach to batting has changed little. His role at RCB, his fifth IPL side, is simply to “get after the bowling in the first six overs.” But McCullum is also a leader in the field, the sort of figure RCB needed to support the captain. “Virat (Kohli) and I, our relationship is very good. The first thing I did when I arrived was speak to him. I said, ‘I’ll throw a whole lot of ideas at you. You don’t feel like you have to use any of them.’ But myself and AB and Quinton (de Kock), who is a very astute thinker of the game, we'll give him ideas.”

McCullum understands well that being a leader is hard work. He captained New Zealand for five years. “My style of leadership was quite consuming,” he says. “It was sort of, ‘let’s go after everything’. Kane (Williamson) has taken the team to a more consistent level.”

What will be remembered, though, is that McCullum helped forge the modern New Zealand team’s reputation of being cricket’s nice guys. “I’m certainly not righteous about it,” he says.