Ratan Tata never called Indian cricket 'ta-ta' in need, gave jobs to everyone from Dhoni to Yuvraj Singh
Ratan Tata Indian Cricket: Calling Ratan Tata an industrialist, one can easily consider the news of his death at the age of 86 as news from the business world. The way he is being remembered all around with respect is proof that he was involved in the development of India and contributed in many ways. Cricket is no different from this. In cricket, thanks to him, IPL and WPL are being named as the biggest associations of Tata Group. They were more of a 'helper' at a critical juncture than actually a sponsor for the IPL. When it suddenly lost its Chinese sponsor during Covid-19, Tata Group itself supported it.
In fact, his biggest and first connection with Indian cricket goes much earlier than this. Tata Group also had a cricket team – JRD Tata had formed Tata Sports Club (TSC) in 1937 itself. Many cricketers worked in different companies of Tata Group – Nari Contractor, Ravi Shastri, Dilip Vengsarkar, Farooq Engineer, Rusi Surti, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh, Mohinder Amarnath, Sanjay Manjrekar, Robin Uthappa, VVS Laxman, Javagal Srinath, Ajit Agarkar, Mohammad Kaif, Shardul Thakur, Jayant Yadav, Sourav Ganguly, MS Dhoni, Kiran More, Sandeep Patil, Suresh Raina, Nikhil Chopra, Irfan Pathan, RP Singh, Dinesh Mongia, Rohan Gavaskar, Ramesh Powar and Jhulan Goswami.
When Sandeep Patil got a chance to play cricket in England in 1979, but he had to make his own travel arrangements and no one was helping, Tata Oil Mills sponsored his ticket and in return kept a condition – his entire focus in England would be on playing cricket. Will have to be installed. Between the 1970s and 1990s, 7 Ranji Trophy team captains of the Bombay team were from the Tata Group – Milind Rege, Sudhir Naik, Ravi Shastri, Vengsarkar, Raju Kulkarni, Lalchand Rajput and Shishir Hattangadi.
The biggest buzz was thanks to a tournament that was named after a brand of the Tata Group. Here we are talking about the Titan Cup, which in many ways was a tournament that gave a new identity to Indian cricket and it is said that with this tournament, Ratan Tata helped India become a powerful force in world cricket. Helped. Sachin Tendulkar was the captain of Team India at that time and from there he developed a close relationship with Ratan Tata and a few days before his death, Sachin Tendulkar went to meet him at his house.
Compared to today's IPL, the Titan Cup played in October-November 1996 was a small tournament. Only 3 teams – India, South Africa and Australia – then inviting Australia to play India in a one-day cricket tournament in the middle of their own cricket season was a big deal. At that time, ODI triangulars were very popular and every country wanted to organize a triangular like Australia's World Series Cricket (WSC). After the World Cup win in 1983, the commercial revolution in cricket in India came only after economic liberalization in 1991. The Hero Cup played in 1993 was the first such attempt. Australia was not among the 5 teams and hence it did not get much discussion.
From this perspective, the Titan Cup became 'bigger' with Australia playing in it. The interesting thing is that they were 'off colour' – losing all 6 games but their coming to India to play at the beginning of their domestic season was an indication of which way the winds of change were blowing in cricket. Ratan Tata became a big sponsor of this tournament and invested so much money in the tournament that both the top teams of that era, Australia and South Africa, came to India to play the tournament.
This was a very strange tournament. Hosts India qualified for the finals in the last over of the final qualifying game and won the Titan Cup by defeating favorites South Africa in the final. They won all their 6 qualifying matches in great fashion. Almost the same thing happened to them in the 1996 World Cup – they won all 5 qualifying matches but lost the quarter-finals. Thus they won 11 of their 13 ODIs in India and Pakistan in 1996, without winning any trophy. The way Sachin Tendulkar's team lost to them in all three qualifying matches – Tendulkar even apologized for the team's poor play. India defeated Australia twice while they lost to South Africa thrice. Australia's worst ever ODI defeat continued with their loss to Sri Lanka in the final of the Singer World Series in September. If they had defeated India in their last match, they would have played the final.
The toss played a sensational role in the final. India won the toss and batted first – score 220-7 (Tendulkar 67, Ajay Jadeja 43*, de Villiers 3-32) and in reply bowled out South Africa for 185 runs in the 48th over. Man of the series was Allan Donald.
After the defeat in the 1996 World Cup semi-finals and then not winning a single match in the England tour, the captain of Team India was changed and young Sachin Tendulkar was the new captain. That's why Titan Cup was very special for him. However, from this tournament, South Africa got a player like Lance Klusener, who took the team close to the final of the 1999 World Cup after 3 years.
Ratan Tata had said after the Titan Cup that he would remain associated with Indian cricket as a sponsor, but in the 2000s, as match-fixing brought cricket into disrepute, he was on the back foot and hence BCCI's decision to buy an IPL team. Despite being on the top in the list of potential contenders, Tata Group did not bid and Tata Group did not have a team in the IPL. However, after Vivo, they became the IPL sponsor and the current contract is till 2028 – worth Rs 2500 crore (about US$301 million) and this is the biggest sponsorship contract in IPL till date.
Despite many new and grand hotels being built in Mumbai, the first choice for BCCI to stay for any of its official functions or for the team is the Taj Hotel of the same group which incidentally was in the news due to a terrorist attack.
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