In The Adrian Shankar Files, a six seven-part series, Scott Oliver delves deep into new material about a player who, in May 2011, was fired just 16 days after signing for Worcestershire when it was discovered that his age and the tournaments he claimed to have played in had been fabricated. We will see in detail how Shankar attempted to land an IPL contract with the help of radical bat brand Mongoose, who saw him as the perfect marketing vehicle in their attempts to crack the Indian market, as well as the methods used to secure his Worcestershire deal.

Part two covers the early ups and downs of Mongoose and the enthralling blog posts written on their website by one of the players in their stable, Adrian Shankar.

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The Mongoose brand was officially launched under bright blue skies at Lord’s on May 22, 2009, with Australia batsman Stuart Law (who, it turned out, had already played his final first-class and List A games) and England players Ebony Rainford-Brent and Laura Marsh wielding its signature product: the MMi3, which the company’s publicity described as “the most radical change to cricket bat design since 1771.” With a blade that was 33 per cent shorter than a conventional bat and a handle that was 43 per cent longer, into which the splice was embedded ensuring there was no dead spot on the blade – dimensions conforming to a recent MCC rule change, assured the fact sheet – it was “scientifically proven by Imperial College to offer batsmen 20 per cent more power and 15 per cent more bat speed.” It was, in short, a bat geared toward revolutionising Twenty20 batting as Twenty20 was revolutionising cricket.

Mongoose founder Marcus Codrington Fernandez was a former senior creative director at Ogilvy, one of the world’s largest advertising and communications agencies. Whatever shortcomings would later emerge with Mongoose’s commercial strategy – chiefly, spiralling sponsorship costs far outstripping bat sales, with the original bat-maker, Tony Cook at Hunts County, initially only able to supply five per day – Codrington Fernandez had some expertise in building brands and generating PR buzz. Thus it was that, with the MMi3 in tow, he appeared on the flagship BBC Breakfast show and enjoyed a five-minute spot on Channel 4 News, unheard of for a small cricket bat manufacturer. Later, there would be high-concept promo shoots with expensively sponsored stars, James Anderson and Marcus Trescothick.

The previous year, his first as a professional cricketer, he had been seconded to Neston for an early-season stint in the Cheshire County League, failing to survive the first over of the game on his first three outings while contributing 0 (6), 0 (4), 2 (6), 15 not out and 2. Perhaps the sharp disappointments of these failures while slumming it with the clubbies informed the depiction of this imaginary game, prefaced by its “laughable warm-ups”:

It is easy with hindsight to wonder quite how this slipped through the net at Mongoose when the means existed to verify it all (the Information Age is not, you would think, the sporting imposter’s friend). But in a world before Shankar’s outing as a fantasist of extraordinary devotion (or maybe even compulsion), there might not have been an obvious reason to suspect that they were anything other than genuine. Who, after all, would go to such lengths? At any rate, there are a number of problems with Norburt’s report. Besides the obvious.

First, as a stalwart beat reporter would have known, Heywood, for whom Shankar played a solitary game in 2009, were members not of the Lancashire League but the Central Lancashire League, as were Rochdale (although the latter have subsequently joined the Lancashire League). Second, neither Charlie Shreck, Basheeru-Deen Walters nor Daren Powell – a Lancashire colleague of Shankar’s at the time and renowned for testing out the middle of the pitch at nets – have ever played for Rochdale (Walters’ first trip to the UK as a club pro came in 2017). Third, while Farhaan Behardien has played for Heywood, this was not until 2014. Fourth, Luke Procter has played 168 CLL games, none of them for Heywood (that 2010 season was the fifth of his six years at Royton, and in both games against Heywood he was dismissed by Rajat Bhatia, the first IPL bowler to feel the force of the MMi3). Fifth, although it hardly needs to be said, no one by the name of Mike Hayhurst played for Rochdale that season. Sixth, Lancashire Cup rules did not allow three contracted players to turn out for the same team. And seventh, 1700 runs in the CLL by late August would already be around 250 more than Sir Garfield Sobers managed in the best of his five seasons at Radcliffe, and would even have eclipsed Sir Frank Worrell’s league record aggregate, also for Radcliffe, of 1694 runs at 112.93 in 1951.

Incredibly, however, Norburt’s report would not only get the Mongoose office excited about the “real deal” Shankar. It would later, in a sort of alt-Moneyball, be forwarded by Codrington Fernandez to the agent of the captain of one of the IPL franchises, as though a performance in a ‘Lancashire Cup quarter final’ might somehow be the clincher.