Indian Clubs Go Tumbling in Champions League

The Delhi Daredevils alone will carry the flag of the Indian Premier League in the playoff stages of the Champions League.

Delhi made it to the final four of the global championship for Twenty20 clubs after a rainout Tuesday against the Titans, a South African team. They will meet another South African team, the Highveld Lions, on Thursday, while the Titans meet the Sydney Sixers in the other semifinal on Friday. The winners will meet in the final on Sunday in Johannesburg.

The other three Indian teams from the most lucrative league in cricket - Kolkata Knight Riders, Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings - are on their way home after they were eliminated.

Their failure is surprising in a tournament designed to favor the Indian teams. Four qualify from the nine-team I.P.L., compared to two each from South Africa and Australia. Teams from other countries - Sri Lanka, Pakistan, West Indies, New Zealand and England - have to play in a qualifying tournament, with six clubs vying for two places this year.

Why the imbalance? Because the tournament originated as a joint enterprise of the Indian, Australian and South African cricket authorities.

“India is the biggest shareholder,” said Jeremy Faul, acting chief executive of Cricket South Africa. “The commercial success of the tournament relies on the Indian interest, so it makes sense to have a lot of Indian teams in there.”

The Indian teams are also likely to prevail when there is a conflict over players who have performed for more than one of the teams in the tournament.

The Australian fast bowler Brett Lee comes from Sydney and plays for the Sydney Sixers in the Big Bash, Australia's Twenty20 championship. But in the Champions League, he played for his I.P.L. team, the Knight Riders.

Lee, though, will be a spectator this week, while his compatriots from Sydney remain active participants. Sydney won every match in the pool stage, while the Indian teams were a combined 5-7.

Mumbai did not win a match, and Kolkata's only victory was in a dead-rubber game after it had already been eliminated; while Chennai broke even over all, it was effectively eliminated once it lost its first two matches.

“It is very disappointing not to qualify for the semifinals, but this is not the end of the world,” said Kolkata's captain, Gautam Gambhir, who promised that his team “will definitely come back stronger in the next edition of the Indian Premier League.”

“We should put it down to the fact that we have not played good cricket and that other teams have batted better than us,” said Mumbai's Dinesh Karthik, who refused to make excuses about his team's play. “The pitches are a little different to those in India, but we even played practice games. They have been good wickets and good teams could play well on them.”

Kolkata's South African all-rounder, Jacques Kallis, strained credulity when he complained that a rain-out against Perth had cost his team a chance to qualify: It came after Kolkata had already lost two matches.

He may, though, have hit on a possible reason why the Indian clubs did not perform so well when he said, “The guys now go away to different parts of the globe and will play for different teams.”

The Indian teams are made up of international all-stars attracted by the huge salaries of the I.P.L. They are created by rotisserie-style auctions, and every three years there are wholesale roster changes, wrecking any sense of continuity.

That makes them very different from the outstanding teams in the pool stages. The Sydney Sixers are based on the New South Wales cricket team in Australia, while the Highveld Lions is based on the Gauteng team in South Africa.

This helps create the team spirit particularly evident in the Lions, who have seen journeymen players produce outstanding performances. “We always knew we could be in a position like this,” said Lions captain Alviro Petersen, who credited “calm and focused performances” in victories over Chennai and Mumbai.

Gulam Bodi played two vital attacking innings for the Lions. (Bodi previously was famous as the player whose selection for a contract by KwaZulu-Natal prompted the South African Kevin Pietersen to invoke his English descent and change countries.) Aaron Phangiso, a 28-year-old spin bowler for the Lions, has been the meanest bowler in the competition, wholly unfazed by the big names in the I.P.L. teams.

“Honestly speaking, I don't look at names,” Phangiso said. “I just work on my game and try and execute what I do best.”

Chemistry, it seems, can outweigh big payrolls, in cricket as well as in baseball.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 25, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.