Only those expecting the apocalypse could feel disappointed. Cricket, as we know it, did not end on a steamy evening in Bangalore. What happened, on this eagerly awaited first night of the Indian Premier League (IPL), was the seamless transfer of a 21st-century form of the game to its most natural habitat.

Not even the slickest organisations can deliver a game to order, though, and it would be fatuous to pretend that this launch match was anything but a huge anticlimax. They say they want the IPL to rival English football's Premier League. If so, Bangalore Royal Challengers must prepare for some very poor reaction to their tepid surrender.

As revolutions go, it even felt a little tame, a little predictable.

There was no great surprise in the full-house crowd of 55,000 and no discernible flaw in a fabulous opening ceremony. Unlike the flowering of floodlit cricket under Kerry Packer 30 years ago, this was merely the feeding of an acknowledged crowd-pleaser to a previously reluctant audience.

Not that there had ever been any serious doubt that India would take to this fast-food cricket. This may still be the East but it is as voracious as any Western appetite in its pursuit of glamour, celebrity and drama.

Twenty20 cricket might have been invented for modern India, which makes it all the more mystifying that it took it so long to realise it.

Even the slick stage-management could not guarantee the right product on the field but if an innings to showcase the possibilities of Twenty20 had been imagined, it would have been the one played by Brendon McCullum.

The muscular New Zealander confessed later to being “very nervous” but you would not have known it. Having almost been run out without facing, by Sourav Ganguly, his captain, McCullum mocked the significantly shortened boundaries with an exhibition of clean hitting that brought gasps from the terraces.

To achieve serious recognition globally, the IPL needed its overseas players - with their head-spinning salaries and the merest suspicion of "take the money and run" - to perform at least as well as the local Indian heroes. Looking like a toy spaceman, with metallic gold helmet and pads over his jet-black Kolkata Knight Riders kit, McCullum quickly sorted that one out.

Having struck Zaheer Khan for 18 in four balls of his first over, his cultivated thrash swept him to a century from only 53 balls. Not content, he advanced to 158 from 73 balls out of a team total of 222 for three. His 13 sixes gave this virgin crowd a taste of what is possible in a form of the game previously alien to them.

It was the highest individual score in any Twenty20 game and it pretty much settled this contest - especially when the red-clothed Royal Challengers lost four early wickets on their way to a pitiful 82. Seeing a vacuous end appeared not to bother the massed stands, though, any more than the defeat for their local side.

It is this that may turn into a concern for the organisers and the worry might first have been detected when the captains were presented before play, and Ganguly was roared far louder than Rahul Dravid, of Bangalore.

If it is a basic requirement of the franchise system that crowds must learn to support their city, even against their lifelong idols, then the IPL marketing men probably have some brainstorming to do, down the line.

This, though, was an occasion to make them feel vindicated and relieved. Every Indian TV station led its news bulletins with IPL yesterday. No pressure, then. So to see this old, loved but ramshackle ground reinvented in rainbow glory, with a near-delirious crowd inside, must have made the backers, financial and otherwise, feel everything was worthwhile.

There is, of course, still the small matter of the hefty investments. Over breakfast at his hotel yesterday, David Collier, the ECB chief executive, ventured to suggest that the franchise owners will need all the ten years of their term even to break even.

Not that Collier was mocking. He also predicted that IPL crowds will “grow and grow” (that was before he watched this game) and offered an olive branch to England players looking on jealously by suggesting that some may get a fortnight of IPL cricket next April - the who and the when is in the hands of Peter Moores, the head coach.

As for an English Premier League, Collier revealed that analysis of several models should be complete by the end of next month. He appears, though, to have almost ruled out aping India's city franchise system, believing it would weaken the county game.

Explore Cricket

• Counties