IPL 2017: Bus, tuk-tuk, plane, slick metro train, tuk-tuk, walk – the 1,173km journey from Pune to Delhi was worth it

Sunrisers Hyderabad batsman Yuvraj Singh plays a shot during the Indian Premier League match against Delhi Daredevils in New Delhi, India, on Tuesday, May 2, 2017. Altaf Qadri / AP Photo

By the time Steve Smith had stopped singing Ben Stokes’s praises after the Englishman’s star turn for Rising Pune Supergiant against Gujarat Lions, the clock had ticked past 12.15am local time.

Adjacent to the press conference room of the concrete bowels of the Maharashtra Cricket Association ground, the 24 guard dogs that live on site were by now in their kennels.

Lucky, Oscar and Chester, the three Rottweilers in the security team, had had a long day. For many other people on duty, though, there was still some of it to go, even though it was already well into the next day by now.

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The next task was navigating the traffic. No easy feat, despite the fact this was the small hours of the morning, at a suburb a long way out of town.

The Pune stadium may be an architectural delight, but it is in the middle of nowhere. Yet, even at 1am, in a place specifically built to avoid city-centre congestion, vehicles trying to escape the stadium found themselves gridlocked.

Some of us had to be somewhere. There was another game on in 17 hours time, at a venue 1,173 kilometres north-east of there, in the Indian capital.

Delhi Daredevils were playing Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Feroz Shah Kotla, starting at 8pm the following night.

To get there in time from Maharashtra required a journey involving a bus, a tuk-tuk, a plane, a slick metro train, another tuk-tuk, and then a walk.

The 1.05pm Vistara Flight 998 from Pune touched down in Delhi at 3.21pm, pouring out its passengers at an airport fit for the capital city of this huge country.

Signs around the Indira Gandhi International Airport celebrate it being the best airport of its size – as per the Airports Council International awards – for the past two years.

It certainly is immaculate. So, too, is the Delhi Metro Airport Express, a slick service that provides a hassle-free, 20-minute direct line into the centre of Delhi for just 50 rupees (Dh3).

So efficient is the city’s metro system, the Daredevils players themselves travelled on it from their hotel to the ground, in specially secured carriages.

Even if theirs was just a short skip across their home city, rather than all the way from Pune, Delhi’s bowlers soon must have wished they had not bothered.

The Sunrisers batsmen are in rare touch at present. David Warner and Shikhar Dhawan did only stay relatively briefly by their standards, but Delhi’s bowlers still suffered. Kagiso Rabada went for 39 in his last two overs, as Yuvraj Singh razed his bowling.

Not that it mattered in the final count up. As the clock struck 11.24pm, Corey Anderson hit the winning blow for the home team, a little under 24 hours since Dan Christian did the same over 1,000kms away.

It had been worth the trip.

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