In the esoteric sport of cricket, a “googly” is a wrist-spun ball that breaks toward the off side despite being bowled with a right-arm leg spinner’s action out the back of the hand. If that all sounds like nonsense to you, then that’s sort of the point. It is a bamboozler of a thing, a play designed to deceive the opposition with subterfuge, misdirection, and sleight of hand. On the pitch, it is politely applauded—one of the finest ploys in this game of infinite ploys. But off the pitch? Well … as a gentleman of a certain age and waistline might declare: It’s just not cricket.
Lalit Modi, the multi-millionaire who founded the world’s most lucrative cricket league, preferred to bowl his googlies away from the arena, so to speak—at meetings in suites at the Four Seasons Resort Dubai, say, or in glossy, splashy pitch decks for his shiny, new investment opportunity.
