With seven days left for Mumbai's first match, Ambani is both nervous and excited. A pad in hand, she takes copious notes, before slipping into a huddle with Nikhil Meswani, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) director, and Rahul Sanghvi, former India spinner and Mumbai manager, to discuss team matters. ( Full coverage IPL-4 )
The 47-year-old is now in her "cricket zone". "I will travel with my boys for the next 50 days. It's nothing but cricket till the tournament ends," she says, as elder son Akash watches mom talk cricket.
For Ambani, the cricket season started earlier than usual this year. She and her husband, RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani, followed the Indian cricket team to the three Ms - Motera (Ahmedabad), Mohali and Mumbai. They even went to President Pratibha Patil's tea party for the winning players. These days, in Ambani's kingdom, work equals cricket. Through the 50-day IPL, which begins on Friday, she will meet her team daily - strategising, securing and scoring off the field.
It wasn't so always.
In the first two IPL seasons, she went for three or four matches each, but only as the "owner's wife". During the team's second-half slump in IPL-2 in South Africa - six losses in their last eight matches - something stirred inside her. The despondency of defeat transformed her from an owner's wife to a cricket aficionado and, eventually, the de facto chief executive.
"When we lost so badly, I told Shaun (Pollock, the coach then) that I need to be in South Africa. I decided at 6 pm and left that same night," she recalls. "The boys looked so sad. I told Mukesh I need to be there with the boys to show them our solidarity."
"That's when I began this restructuring," she says.
In that sense, her evolution in cricket and her hands-on engagement with the Mumbai franchise is barely two years old. "She brings soul to the franchise," says Sundar Raman, CEO of IPL. "Her involvement with the team is extreme. People don't see the hard work she puts on the ground."
Learning Curve
Incidentally, when Mukesh Ambani told her he had bought a cricket team for $111.9 million, the most expensive franchise in IPL in 2008, her first reaction was anger. How would they manage one more business when their hands were full? He replied professionals would run the franchise.
That was 2008. Today, she runs the show, and even steals it. Last year, she was part of the core committee of Mumbai Indians, along with players Sachin Tendulkar , Zaheer Khan and Harbhajan Singh, and coach Robin Singh. The group of five took all important decisions during matches, and she sat in meetings even while deciding things like the batting order.
She might be the owner's wife, but she shows she belongs. She can hold forth on Zaheer Khan's ability to reverse swing the old ball, or the character of the Wankhede pitch, or the nuances of the doosra, or Gautam Gambhir's ability to pace an innings, or the benefits of a wide gully to an off-spinner. She laughs when she recounts what husband Mukesh says to people looking for her at a do: "Find out where there is a cricket conversation, and you are sure to find Nita there!"
Cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle, an advisor to the Mumbai Indians in IPL-1, has observed her cricket journey from both close and afar. "When she became the team owner, she began watching a lot of cricket," he says. Just before the 2010 Champions League - the club T20 world championship - he was interviewing her for a TV show. "At one point, she held her first two fingers together, with the thumb beneath, and said that in South Africa, the 'ball will seam, it won't turn a lot', and she gestured like a spinner would," he says. "I remember telling her how far she had come."
Ambani taking over the reins coincided with a surge in the team's performance. In the first two seasons, the franchise failed to make the semi-finals, while compiling a win-loss record of 7-7 in IPL-1 and 5-8 (one match was rained off) in IPL-2. In IPL-3, they won 11 of their 14 matches in the group stage and made it to the finals.
Financially, too, the trajectory was similar. A top Mumbai Indians of-ficial says the franchise had accumulated losses of 45 crore in the first two years, but it fell to 4-5 crore in 2010. "We will break even this year," Ambani claims. Of course, cash is hardly an issue for the team whose owner is the world's ninth richest person, with a net worth of $27 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
Taking Charge
An assured $11 million share from the 'central pool' - TV rights and central sponsorship - is expected to account for about 50% of the franchise's revenues.
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