Royal Family

GH pays a visit on them

It’s 8am Saturday, and the carpark at Cutting Edge, a well-kept indoor cricket centre in Bundoora, is filling up fast. A score of teenage boys and girls are filing in wearing lookalike training gear. Everyone is punctual despite some have driven hours to get here, and that nobody today is batting or bowling: it is just a two-hour fitness and fielding session overseen by a strength and conditioning coach with a voice like a drill sergeant’s. Inside - a nice touch - there is a coffee cart for parents.

Cricket in Melbourne in May may be thought of as unusual on its own, but what sets this gathering apart is the brand on the eye-catching tops: this Academy is under the auspices of the Rajasthan Royals, who just hours earlier had been hosting Deccan Chargers in Jaipur. The programme’s promotional material is adorned by the cherubic features of the Royals’ wunderkind Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, currently bossing the Indian Premier League and Instagram having been scouted from the Royals’ main high-performance centre in Nagpur not eighteen months ago.

15 for heaven’s sake

Interestingly, the Royals are not first IPL franchise to put out such feelers here: the Chennai Super Kings rolled out a small Super Kings Academy at Sydney’s Cricket Central in August 2024, complementing multiple centres in Tamil Nadu. But of all the IPL’s franchises, notes the academy’s head of cricket Andrew Crook, the Royals is one most closely identified with a ‘development mentality’. Having been the cheapest of the original franchises, it set out to be the most innovative, not reliant on the happenstance of the auction alone: founder Manoj Badale’s A New Innings (2022) established him as something of a thought leader in the game.