Australia wins IPL.

As Saurav Ganguly and Shane Warne locked horns in the middle, teammate Yusuf Pathan looked on furiously.

That was an earlier game, but the image stays with you.

The Aussiefication of Rajasthan Royals if not complete, was truly underway then.

It harked back to earlier images of the Symonds, Hayden, Clarke trio taking on Bhajji Down Under.

The Aussies hunt in pairs; if not more, but rarely less.

When they take on the elusive ball hurtling downstream towards the boundary, chances are, there will be a pack of Aussie wolves chasing it down –never a lone wolf but a pack.

One for the slide, one for the throw. One for God knows what eventuality.

Rajasthan Royals took this groupism to a new art form in the finals when Kaif and Kamran Akmal caught a ball and a collision simultaneously.

And when they chased down balls there was an almost Aussielike certainty to them.

None of those all in vain escort service runs alongside the ball.

There were few, if any glaring missfields from erstwhile misfit Munaf Patel. There were even fewer criticisms on air of Munaf – till only the last India game that Patel played, Patel bashing had an ever greater following than Tendulkar adulation.

Patel bowled his trademark albeit repetitive short-of-length fare, game after game. He even snorted at the odd batsman. Here was a guy whose shoulders had fallen beyond drooping while wearing the India cap. A guy who withdrew to his village, only to snap back, unhinged through the press. A guy who his captain claimed “does not think”.

What did his new captain think of him?

And then there were the nameless “two lefthanders” – Ravindra Jadeja and Niraj Patel, who in true Aussie back-from- the- brink batsmanship beat the smiles off Mumbai. By now Tendulkar would know their names.

As would everybody know Asnodkar’s. It’s Asnodkar, right?

And Pathan will no longer mean Irfan Pathan. If anything, it could be big bro Yusuf –whose first international sighting was in the T20 World Cup finals as opener –where he smashed a six, and out soon after. Guts then, and glory now.

And what about Kamran Akmal, who played a few, didn’t come off, sat out, and then came back, sat out for the semis, and returned yet again for the finals. Not a rollercoaster but a joyride, it seemed. Little man Akmal smashed sixes, appealed, and even ran himself out with the enthusiasm of a player on whom the collective fortunes of the Royals depended. A Royal Guard, almost like Amitabh Bachchan’s character in Eklavaya, as the Royal Guard. Only here there was no asking, who’s your Daddy? It was Shane Warne.

Akmal aside, every player in the team was a Royal Guard – and the Jaipur Fort was not going to be breached. No way.

Not before you got past Graeme Smith, Shane Watson, Yusuf Pathan, Sohail Tanvir, Kamran Akmal, Ravindra Jadeja, Swapnil Asnodkar, Pankaj Singh, Munaf Patel, Niraj Patel, Siddharth Trivedi, Mohammed Kaif

And even if you got past them, you’d run into another player, a captain, a coach.

You’d run into Shane Warne.

Chances are, you would have run out of steam by then.

And he would run over you.

Here’s to Warne and his team:

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
We see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world,
Are the ones who do.

(The text used in the introductory “Think Different” commercial created by Chiat/Day)