Rajasthan Royals captain Riyan Parag was in London last week, watching West Ham hold Manchester City to a 1-1 draw at the London Stadium. On the face of it, an IPL captain attending a Premier League game is nothing more than a holiday. But Parag wasn’t just there to watch football. He was there to learn.
It was perhaps an odd choice for a game. West Ham are in the middle of a relegation battle, clutching at straws with just 29 points from 30 games, every fixture now carrying the weight of consequence. When City took the lead through a Bernardo Silva chip, 60,000 Hammers fans didn’t flinch.
Four minutes later, Bowen swung in a corner, a moment of chaos followed in the box, and Mavropanos headed home.
West Ham had nicked a point against one of Europe’s most decorated sides, refusing to give up till the final minute in a resilient defensive display. The draw not only helped them sneak a point against a rampaging City side, but more importantly kept them alive in the Premier League, their fight stretching on for at least another week.
The stadium, by Parag’s own account, was deafening from start to finish, riding every tackle and clearance, demanding effort and feeding off it in equal measure. And while watching from the stands, something clicked.
PARAG’S WEST HAM PARALLEL
During his trip to London, the newly appointed Rajasthan Royals captain had sat down with West Ham skipper Jarrod Bowen. The conversation went somewhere most pre-organised interviews don’t, drifting away from rehearsed answers into something more honest, more difficult to articulate.
The Indian batter, who is an avid follower of the Premier League, asked him the question he’d actually come to ask: how do you keep a dressing room alive when the season is already gone? How do you get players to care when the points table has already moved on without them?
Parag knew how it felt to watch the season slip away between his fingers. The stand-in captain for Rajasthan last season, Parag, endured a difficult campaign, with his side losing close games on multiple occasions, often finding ways to fall short in moments that mattered.
And in the IPL, when you lose a stretch of games, it is hard to come back, harder still to keep belief from quietly slipping away.
“Last year we were ninth,” Parag said. “How do you motivate your players to come out and perform every single time, knowing you’re not going to win the trophy, knowing you’re not going to qualify, but still going out there and putting on a show for everyone who’s paid their hard-earned money?”
Bowen, apparently, had answers, revealed Parag in a select media interaction organised by the English Premier League.
“The way he’s handled himself, the way he’s passed on his messaging and motivation to his team, without sounding arrogant, without coming across the wrong way, that’s something I can learn from,” Parag said. “I’m really glad I had those conversations. If we’re ever in a similar situation in the IPL, this year, next year, whenever, that’s going to be really helpful.”
It is one thing to ask those questions in a room. It is another thing to then step out and watch a team live those principles in real time.
RR: A FRANCHISE STILL WAITING
To understand why this resonated so deeply, you need to understand what Parag is walking into.
Rajasthan Royals won the very first IPL title in 2008. A team of supposed misfits, led by the late, great Shane Warne, beat Chennai Super Kings in what remains one of the great underdog stories in the tournament’s history. Nobody saw it coming. That was rather the point.
Eighteen years on, multiple superstars later, they are still chasing that feeling, still searching for a season where everything aligns the way it once did.
In the last decade, a young Sanju Samson carried the hopes of the franchise, becoming the face of the club through seasons that promised much and delivered little, often bearing the weight of expectation through inconsistency. But Samson has now moved on, and with him goes a certain era.
The baton has been passed to Parag, who has been at the club since 2019, and has been elevated to a position where much is expected of him, not just as a player, but as the one expected to steer the franchise into a new phase. It is a loaded inheritance.
RR, WEST HAM: TWO CLUBS, ONE STORY
West Ham is a club with a similarly complicated relationship with their own history. Cult-followed, never champions of England, and yet a consistent producer of world-class talent. Frank Lampard, Declan Rice and Michael Carrick all came through East London. The pedigree is real, but the trophy cabinet tells a different story.
This season, they find themselves staring down the Championship, with relegation a genuine possibility, every game now carrying an edge that goes beyond points. Parag saw something of Rajasthan in all of it.
“I didn’t see a single supporter fanboying Haaland or Doku or Foden,” he said. “Everyone just wanted West Ham to win.” For a young captain about to lead a franchise still searching for its second title, that kind of unconditional support was something to sit with, something that lingers long after the final whistle.
LESSONS HE’S TAKING HOME
A trip to England means that, beyond Bowen, Parag also came away with two other reference points for the season ahead, small but significant pieces in shaping the kind of leader he wants to become.
Bruno Fernandes, for the way he has remained a constant at Manchester United through managerial changes and a difficult campaign, continues to demand standards regardless of circumstances. And Haaland, for the ruthless efficiency he brings every time a chance arrives, the ability to reduce the chaos of a game into moments that can be decided in an instant. “Those three attributes,” Parag said, “will help me in my season this year.”
The broader point is simple. Parag went to London not as a tourist, but as a student of leadership, willing to keep his eyes and ears open, willing to learn what was put in front of him.
He watched a relegation-threatened side hold their nerve against the best. He sat with a captain holding things together, anchoring a season that could easily have drifted away.
As Rajasthan’s hunt for the title begins, Parag hopes that, like Bowen and West Ham, he can provide that glimmer of hope where no one expects it to be found, and more importantly, make his lessons count when they are tested the most.
