There’s something that is quite admirable about Mumbai Indians. While Akash Ambani has his idiosyncrasies & superstitions (not a bad thing to be honest), he sets a great precedence as a team owner who wants to actually understand the fundamentals of the scouting operations (1/n) https://twitter.com/thefallingsweep/status/1298181535019995136

Of the squad, understanding the numbers that their data analysts churn out, the reports that the scouts have turned out for various players & shows a willingness to not superimpose his will on the cricketing side of the matters & let Mahela, Zaheer et al & the scouts (2/n)

Take the major calls & have a crack auction strategy which can be modified on the fly to suit the needs of the side. That’s often helped them pull out some brilliant bargain buys & discover talents hitherto unknown earlier. This is in stark contrast to RCB in the Mallya era (3/n)

Where Vijay Mallya took his “King of Good Times” philosophy to the auction table with disastrous results to follow in the ground, where he tried to superimpose his dominance & his non-existent cricketing knowledge into matters of buying players at auctions or team (4/n)

Selections, which often had them get comped at various stages of the IPL. The lesson this encompasses is that owners should NOT meddle with team selections & buying players at the auction if they don’t have any knowledge of the game. Let the experts handle it (5/n)

Like in Kolkata Knight Riders, where CEO Venky Mysore, Chief Scout & Analyst A.R. Srikkanth & the coaching staff make the big decisions at the auction table or how Sunrisers Hyderabad approach the auctions. The owner should either be like a Parth Jindal at Delhi Capitals (6/n)

Who have experience of running successful sporting teams beforehand or an Akash Ambani at Mumbai, who try & understand the processes or be hands-off like SRK at KKR or Sun TV Networks at SRH, who let the experts handle the processes. Try doing a Mallya & the result is failure.