RCB's IPL reckoning: Part 1 - The dream designed

In the first part of an in-depth interview on RCB's maiden IPL triumph, Director of Cricket Mo Bobat tells Cricbuzz about the benefit of the franchise's struggles in 2024, the process of appointing Rajat Patidar as captain, and how they approached the mega auction ahead of the 2025 season.

Mo, before we get to the cricket, it would be remiss not to speak about the day after the final, the stampede at Chinnaswamy during the victory celebrations...

Cricket and the IPL is so much about passion and enjoyment, and one of our biggest motivators is our fans. We talked during the competition that we want to win it for our fans. They've been the patient ones. Some of us are new. These fans have waited 18 years, so we wanted to do it for them, and for some of them to have lost their lives just feels incredibly sad. We look forward to being able to recognise those people and their families. Their stories become a part of our history now. Every sports team has a history, and it has a heritage. What they've experienced becomes a part of our heritage and history, and we have to honour them.

I want to pick up from around the midpoint of your first season at RCB, just before that home game against SRH in 2024, when they smashed 287. You did media then, and someone asked if the rest of the 2024 season was a free hit for 2025. Looking back now, was that actually a pivotal moment in setting up what came next?

Well, it is a very good place to start. Naturally a lot of people have asked me questions about this season, and I usually start with the season before. Because that was my first full season and Andy's [Flower] first full season with RCB. And it was a steep learning curve. I'm very grateful for that learning curve, actually. I wouldn't change that season. We ended up being one win from eight games. I remember doing the media, and I hopefully gave the impression that we hadn't given up on the season. Because that is the truth.

Myself and Andy were pretty proud and satisfied that despite the fact that we weren't winning or playing that well, the culture and the environment that we had created with the senior players and captain was still strong. I've been in environments where you're losing and you feel it in the environment. But I've also experienced times when you're losing and everyone is still striving and working together. And it felt like that last year, so I was confident that we were holding the group and holding the environment.

Andy and I are pretty honest guys. If we're not playing well and we're losing, we will look at what we can do first. We won't blame pitches or conditions or our position or umpires. We were hunting really hard for how we could improve. And we were confident that if we kept sticking to that and kept focussing on improving the way we play, that we could turn things around.

Obviously, it was great to then go on that run and to win six in a row and qualify. And we finished where we deserved to finish at the end of the day. We weren't good enough to go any further unfortunately. But we were good enough to finish fourth, which was probably a fair reflection on the group and the season we had had.

Let's go right back to the start then... you were with England cricket for more than a decade, won two white-ball World Cups, helped set up the transition into this 'Bazball' era. Why RCB?

Obviously, I worked for England for a long time. I did 12 years in various roles, and my last four years were as performance director. That was a role I really enjoyed. I could have done that for many more years. It was a great job working with brilliant people and brilliant players, and we were having real fun turning around our Test team, and working closely with the likes of Baz [McCullum] and Ben [Stokes] was really good fun as well.

But I had spent two to three years consulting with RCB in a very remote capacity. Nothing too detailed, nothing too heavy. Working closely with Mike Hesson, who was obviously Director of Cricket then. And Sanjay [Bangar]... two people that I admire. I enjoyed helping out and learning a little bit more about the IPL, because obviously when you're working in international cricket, dealing with franchise cricket and auctions is very different.

When their contract came to an end at the end of the 2023 season, and both Sanjay and Mike parted ways with RCB, the franchise asked me whether I wanted to be Director of Cricket. My initial response was that it wasn't the right timing. We were in the middle of the Ashes at home, and everyone will know the Ashes is a big deal for England cricket. You want all the concentration to be on that. So at that stage we just said, 'Look, let's just pause on it for now. I'll have some time to think about it.'

The more I thought about it, the more I discussed it with a few people. I spoke to Andy, someone I really trust and I've enjoyed working with. I think the statistics back it up, but I think he's the most impressive and the best head coach in the world. I spoke to him and said, 'Look, I'm thinking about doing this. What do you think? Do we want to have a go at this together as a project?'

There might be some people that would be daunted by the challenge of RCB. They hadn't won the trophy. They have big icon players. There's huge expectation. Andy and I, our personalities are like: those things are all attractive; none of those things are daunting. We thought if we're going to do something together, let's take on a big challenge and try and bring success to a franchise that is really craving it. Then obviously we both came on board within a few months.

Andy was head coach at Lucknow Super Giants then, right?

He was coming towards the end of his contract with Lucknow. And to me, if I was going to be Director of Cricket, I couldn't think of a better coach than Andy to be with me. There are obviously loads of brilliant coaches out there, but he's the guy that I wanted to work closely with. Because we have a very trusting relationship.

What I mean by trusting is... anyone who's seen his work will know that that doesn't mean we're just agreeing all the time. It actually means that we are prepared, both of us, to do whatever it takes to win. We have similar values in how we want people to feel and the environment to feel. And we will support each other to make sure that we do everything that it takes to deliver the sort of success that we want. And we both like challenges. So, yeah, he was the obvious candidate I had in mind to be our head coach.

That you joined RCB a year before the mega auction... In hindsight, did having that full season help you get under the hood, figure out what wasn't working for RCB, and build towards a new cycle with experience in the bank, rather than walking in cold?

Absolutely. My job as Director of Cricket is to have one eye on the short term and also one eye on the medium to long term. And I remember saying to Andy when we were one win from eight, and he probably thought I was a little bit mad, 'Look, this is a great challenge. This is what we came here for. We've got to get excited by this challenge.'

But I also said to him that this was proving very helpful for me in my understanding of what it takes to win IPL games and the IPL. It was giving me extreme clarity on things like the type of environment and culture you try to create that helps people to play well, the type of support staff you want and the expertise you need in your coaching group. That was really helpful. How you might want to approach your planning and reviewing of games and your tactics, the type of squad and play group that you need, some of the key roles, some of the disciplines, how you might approach the auction. Also, some of the lessons that RCB needed to learn, maybe, about how we've spent our money in the past, the things we prioritise, winning at the Chinnaswamy.

There's a number of things that, whilst we were losing, we were taking note and interrogating every detail to go, 'Right, we've got to correct some of these things.' Because there were mistakes we were making and maybe there were mistakes that others might have made in the past as well. So, I think that season being the way it did really enabled us to learn and it meant that from the moment the 2024 season ended, I felt very clear on what our priorities were going into the auction, crystal clear.

And in this first year it's worked for us and, you know, what worked this year might not work next year. I'm very aware of that. We've got to keep adapting and evolving.

Did you feel the need to address the elephant in the room early on, the fact that RCB had never won a title? Or were you more focused on shutting that noise out and just putting the right processes in place?

The answer is a little bit of both. If 'not winning it' is the elephant in the room, you can't ignore it and pretend it's not there. You only have to come to Bengaluru for five minutes and somebody will ask you about RCB winning the trophy. So you have to reference it, but you have to frame it appropriately. And our framing was, we didn't want the shirt and the expectation to weigh heavy on people. We wanted to look at it as an opportunity.

The fact is, RCB were going to win the IPL at some stage. That's a fact. In another 100 years, they'll win it once, right? So, why not us? That's the opportunity.

We did a little bit of work with somebody called Owen Eastwood [a Performance Coach]. You may have heard of him. He has spent time before with the New Zealand All Blacks, Cricket South Africa, with England Football. He's a bit of an expert on culture, environment, leadership and messaging. I knew him from elsewhere. He gave us a bit of advice on how we might message those sorts of things. How we might frame winning to the players in a way that they can get excited but not daunted by it. We paid attention to all of those things. That's why I think in that first year, even though we lost our first few games, we kept the environment quite strong because people were buying into what we were talking about.

And then once you get into your season, you do have to do what you said. You have to focus on processes. You have to focus on the way you're playing. I feel very strongly about that. That was my experience with England. When Eoin Morgan did special things with the England white-ball team, he was really obsessively focused on how the boys played. The same is true now for Baz and Ben. They spend a lot of time focussing on mindset and the way they play. And I was really keen for us to do similar with RCB. If we really focus on how we want to play and the mindset, you've got to trust that the results over a period of time will take care of themselves.

From a cricketing or cultural point of view, what stood out to you as things that weren't quite working at RCB? What were these priorities you felt needed addressing?

So, one of the things that struck me quite strongly is we needed to have a greater clarity on how we wanted to play. And whenever you think about how you want to play, you've got to think about mindset. You have to think about roles and skills. You also have to think about the sort of players that might be available, because you can't have a view of how you want to play and have it void or separate from the players you've got. You know, sometimes the players you've got will dictate the way you play, not necessarily the other way around.

But I was clear we needed a greater understanding and sense of how we wanted to play and how we wanted to win games, and particularly what that might look like at home. So, we invested some time in trying to understand that. And actually, the second half of that 2024 season, it started to turn. There were a few things we did in the season. Faf [du Plessis] and Virat [Kohli] led some of the changes we made to the way we were batting, going hard at the top. The bowling attack became a bit more aggressive and wicket-taking, which we wanted to prioritise. So, there were a number of things that we did that people probably saw in that season that we started to shift the way we played.

We also knew that we had to think about the way we spent our money. And RCB in the past had spent a lot of money on top-order batters. They'd probably overspent on batting relative to bowling, and not spent enough on Indian domestic talent and Indian domestic experience. So, there were a number of things there that we thought: 'Let's try not to make some of those same decisions.' So, we didn't want to spend quite so much on our top-order at the cost of the middle-order or lower-order, for example. We wanted to balance out bowling versus batting and make sure we had a bowling attack that was good enough to win games, particularly at a difficult place like the Chinnaswamy. We wanted to make sure that we had a strong Indian core and we really prioritised that Indian core.

I'm guessing a big part of that Indian core you've spoken about also ties into having an Indian captain in place: was that a deliberate priority in search of this balance you talk about?

Yes, a big part of that Indian core was also a difficult decision on captaincy. We obviously had Faf as captain, who is a brilliant leader and a brilliant captain, and somebody that both Andy and I admire hugely. And if I'm honest with you, we could have stuck with him as captain. He's someone I trust a lot. Unfortunately, his age was probably working a little bit against him. Being a big auction cycle, you've got three years to make that kind of decision. Because if you make a decision in year one and you don't quite make the right call, it's three years before you can undo it. That's not easy. So, had it not been a big auction, we may well have stuck with Faf because we trusted him so much.

We made the decision to move on from him as captain and we were quite keen on an Indian captain. And given that we were trying to do things a little bit differently, we felt like a new RCB needed a new leader as well. So, having someone like Rajat [Patidar] lead the team, ensuring that he had support from people like Virat on the field, someone like Dinesh Karthik off the field, Andy as well, and some other really good senior players like Jitesh [Sharma], Krunal [Pandya], Bhuvi [Bhuvneshwar], Josh Hazlewood, Phil Salt. There's a lot of experience there, guys who have captained their countries.

When did you zero in on Rajat Patidar as captain? Once the auction was done, from the outside it felt like there were maybe three main options: going back to Virat Kohli or take some left-field calls with Krunal Pandya or Patidar. How did that decision take shape?

Actually, if I'm totally honest, the thought on Rajat was even earlier than what people might have thought. So midway through the 2024 season, I think