Everything happening at once
The third IPL came home. It ran from 12 March to 25 April 2010, earlier in the year than the two before it, and it was the first cricket tournament streamed live on YouTube — a decision that looks obvious now and looked strange then. The last four matches were shown in 3D in cinemas. Sixty matches, more than any season so far, and by the end of it the man who built the league had been suspended.
Sachin's season
Sachin Tendulkar was 36 when the tournament started. He made 618 runs, took the Orange Cap, won Player of the Tournament and carried Mumbai Indians to the final. He had never played a full IPL season before this one. For an Indian audience that had watched him for twenty-one years and had watched him being told, roughly annually, that the short format had passed him by, this was a fairly complete answer. He made 48 off 45 in the final and finished on the losing side.
The bombs at Chinnaswamy
On 17 April, before Royal Challengers Bangalore played Mumbai Indians, two devices exploded at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium and a third was defused; a fourth was found the following day. All had been hidden in the perimeter wall. Around fifteen people were reported injured. The match went ahead after an hour's delay. Both semi-finals were then moved out of Bangalore to the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai. Ian Botham, Brian Lara, Steve Waugh and Shaun Pollock all publicly urged players not to walk away.
Chennai finally get one
Chennai Super Kings had reached the 2008 final and the 2009 semi-final and won neither. They scraped into the top four in 2010 and then did not lose again. Doug Bollinger took 4 for 13 in the semi-final against Deccan Chargers. In the final on 25 April, Chennai made 168 for 5 with Suresh Raina 57 not out off 35, and Mumbai fell 22 short. Raina took the match award. Pragyan Ojha of Deccan won the Purple Cap with 21 wickets.
The season also staged a third-place play-off, on 24 April, which Bangalore won against Deccan by nine wickets. The IPL has never staged one since.
What the season is really remembered for
Shortly after the final, Lalit Modi — founder, first chairman and commissioner of the IPL, and BCCI vice-president — was suspended by the board, accused of misconduct, indiscipline and financial irregularities. The row had run through the tournament itself. Modi had made public the ownership structure of the newly awarded Kochi franchise, which showed indirect free equity held on behalf of an associate of Shashi Tharoor, then a Union minister. Tharoor resigned. The Kochi consortium in turn alleged that Modi had been harassing them because he had wanted a different bid to win. Modi did not run another IPL.
So 2010 sits awkwardly. It was the season the league grew up commercially — YouTube, 3D, a viewership estimated above 200 million in India — and the season in which the question of who actually governed the thing, and on what terms, stopped being a matter of trust and started being a matter of investigation.