Most of our summer vacations were spent in Hyderabad. While at my grandfather’s, we would make good use of the part of his compound that was leased out to a school, which closed in summer. We would take turns to bat and bowl, practise our strokes and aim for windowpanes. One summer, I remember my dad being particularly lethal with the ball. Delivery after delivery, he foxed us batsmen into pulling all the wrong shots with a cunning left-arm spin. I must’ve been 10. And that was my first introduction to spin bowling.

When Neel Roy heads to Ranchi for winter vacations with his grandparents in Junior Premier League , I felt a familiar thrill. The city offers no prospects, especially not of the cricketing kind, at first. One evening, on his way to the local store, Neel’s cricket-starved ears pick up the “rhythmic thump of a Cosco ball”. Curious, he spies a ‘curly-headed’ boy bowling with the strangest action he had seen. “Instead of coming over his right ear, as any good bowler should, the kid was slinging the ball almost parallel to the ground — much like Malinga. But he was bowling spin,” writes Joy Bhattacharjya in Junior Premier League .

Over the next two weeks, Neel and his new friend Sachin Rawat, who is a Chris Gayle fan, play cricket, watch cricket videos and discuss the Junior Premier League that is to kick-off right after the summer break, for which Neel had been shortlisted.

Back in Delhi, Neel forgets about Ranchi and Sachin as the JPL draws near. With help from Shruti, the over-enthusiastic older sister, Neel and his classmate Aryaman Khurana prepare for the JPL trials. “In four weeks, 2,000 boys would go through a week of trials. Just 30 boys would be chosen for the final camp, and by the time JPL started only 20 boys would remain,” writes Bhattacharjya. Miraculously, Sachin moves to Delhi and into Neel’s school, gets nominated for the trials, gets noticed at the week-long camp and makes it to the final Junior Devils team, along with Neel and Aryaman. Ravinder Singh, the superstar captain, his cronies, and India’s most successful junior coach Satyajit Sinha complete the cast of the Junior Devils.

Drawing on his own experience as the team director of Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL, Bhattacharjya fashions a Junior Premier League that is ready to fly off the pages and make its real-world debut even before the current IPL season ends. The matches are exciting and the characters immensely believable, such as “secret weapon” Sachin, trivia-buff Neel and mercurial Ravinder.

Sledging and intimidation are as much a part of the junior IPL; when Sachin bowls a doosra to claim his first scalp of the tournament, Mumbai Patriot’s best batsman walks on to the crease, locks eyes with him and says, “That might work with Jayesh but it won’t work with Milind Sugwekar.” Dramatic stuff indeed.

Even the much-maligned Duckworth Lewis system makes an appearance in a Junior Devils match. Who can forget the heartburn this insane method has caused? Remember the group-stage match in the 2003 World Cup, when South Africa lost by one run because they read the D/L charts wrong?

If the plot itself seems predictable, of course, you know how it’s going to unfold right from selections to the winner, it is the matches, the players, the descriptions of the field placements and nuggets of cricket trivia — how players choose their jersey numbers, how top fielders practise catches at the boundary, that make the Junior Devils’ journey an exciting one. Throw in a team item number ( Give them hell, Devils ), a coach’s mysterious disappearance, a cheating scandal, famous rivalries and media attention and Bhattacharjya’s JPL is the stuff the best IPLs are made of. This, the first of a three-part series, is the sort of book one might pick up for a summer or winter break at the end of which awaits a cricket camp.

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