A vast placard gazes down on the shrieking traffic outside the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium. “Born in Bangalore to thrill the nation” it declares amid moody images of the players who will launch cricket’s latest revolution tomorrow. Near by, a small, sober poster reminds us that it will also be World Heritage Day.

If cricket had a similar occasion, a movement to protect its sacred customs, it would rail against the Indian Premier League (IPL). It may also ponder the irony of such irreverence being the product of a country whose population used to see the traditional game as a temple.

In 1975, India regarded the first World Cup as such an imposition that Sunil Gavaskar spent a 60-over innings making 36. Small wonder that when Kerry Packer opened his chequebook to facilitate that first, rancorous revolution two years later not one Indian signed up. But that was when cricket here was neither rich nor greedy.

England were touring India when Packer’s covert enrolments began, early in 1977. They arrived in Bangalore at the end of January for a Test that filled the Chinnaswamy to its 55,000 capacity every day. It could not happen now, not for Test cricket, but there will be mass wringing of corporate hands if it is not full tomorrow. Too much money is at stake to be sanguine about a slow start. Scepticism remains, but scuffles and overturned tills in an unruly queue for tickets suggest that the public appetite is robust.

India was a different cricket venue in 1977. No one-day cricket was scheduled, while floodlights, helmets and coloured clothes were the stuff of fevered imaginings. Bollywood had yet to stir and the nation adopted Tony Greig as its favourite celebrity. Two months later he was a Packer player and the sport would never be the same.

Bangalore was always India’s Garden City. Now it is Silicon City, a computer-driven microcosm of a nation’s suddenly swollen rich list. There are still some desolate sights, still the horns, fumes and 100,000 rickshaws, but also state-of-the-art office complexes and ritzy shopping malls.

It likes to call itself the City of Empowerment. An appropriate venue, then, for the inaugural IPL match, for this swiftly conceived and dramatically marketed event is as much about the empowerment of the modern cricketer as, in hindsight, was Packer’s World Series Cricket (WSC).

On the outfield yesterday a troupe of cheerleaders was rehearsing, a stage was being erected and, amid the usual frantic brinkmanship of a big match in India, every inch of the stand roofs branded with the rainbow hoardings of IPL teams. In early evening, Rahul Dravid and his Bangalore team, Royal Challengers, practised in the middle. These players cost almost $6 million (about £3 million) to assemble but still came cheaper than Kolkata Knight Riders, their opposition tomorrow.

Unlike their WSC predecessors, these players were sourced openly and selected in the most public forum of an auction. They have not had to lie or deny, as the Packer pioneers did three decades ago. But nor have most of them known how to express their views. The majority have settled for saying that the project is “exciting”, which it is for their bank balances. Whether they believe that the cricket will retain its appeal to an increasingly fickle population is open to argument.

Packer learnt from a challenging first season, much of it played in empty football grounds. While those who resented his intrusions chuckled smugly and awaited his surrender, Packer regrouped. He realised that WSC would not succeed as a rebellious imitation of “the real thing”, so he focused on what he did differently — floodlit cricket. T-shirts emblazoned with “Big Boys Play At Night” became fashion currency and opening night at a delirious Sydney Cricket Ground is an indelible landmark in the sport.

What happens here in the next six weeks owes everything to the success of that night. But Packer also needed to engage the Australian public in a patriotic way. This he achieved — and in an Ashes winter, no less — through a peerless television commercial scatter-gunned with dizzying floodlit highlights and overdubbed with the jingly ditty, C’mon Aussie C’mon. It became an anthem for a nation and relaunched WSC to mass popularity.

Since India’s Test series against South Africa ended this week, the IPL has to take on only its black-sheep brother, the Indian Cricket League. That faded out quietly on Tuesday with a final in Hyderabad.

Still, conscious of the need for partisanship, the IPL has delved into the backlist of Packer innovations and created its own TV advertising campaign. It invests heavily in Bollywood acting and one commercial, for Mumbai Indians, is like a street scene from West Side Story. Others are more sexually suggestive than old India would ever have endorsed. All, like Packer’s template, have fast-moving glamour as their message.

India’s money men have done their bit. They have bankrolled the franchises, bought the teams, financed the promotion and flexed their egos. The rest is down to the players, the fans and their commitment to a cause in which, for the first time, they must represent, or support, a city.

The consummation of that manufactured affinity is key to the tournament. Of one thing, though, there is no doubt. Packer made credible the notion that cricketers would play for money rather than local or national pride. The currency of that realisation has never been stronger.

ICC faces player threat

The world’s leading cricketers are ready to break away from the ICC, the game’s governing body, over fears that the sport is becoming crippled by the influence of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, it was claimed last night.

Ian Smith, the international legal adviser to the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations, said that the group would effectively hold a vote of no confidence in the ICC next month. He said: “People are increasingly seriously asking why we aren’t walking away. The competence of the administrators is being called into question. There is no loyalty at all towards the ICC."