It's 6.15pm at Bengaluru's M Chinnaswamy Stadium, the evening before Royal Challengers Bangalore play Kolkata Knight Riders. The teams are training on either side of the square and in between them, two men are chatting - one in KKR's training kit, the other in an RCB polo.
James Foster, KKR's assistant coach, is catching up with Mo Bobat, who has come to India for a week in his role as a performance consultant for RCB. Foster has regularly worked with England as an assistant coach in the last three years, while Bobat is the ECB's performance director.
David Willey walks past them and towards the changing rooms, having finished his pre-match net. When he re-emerges, ball in hand, he wanders over to RCB and England white-ball analyst Freddie Wilde and the pair discuss plans for the following evening: how should Willey attack
Jason Roy?
On the other side of the square, Roy is waiting to bat in the KKR nets, having started his session slightly later than his team-mates because of media duties. "To play here, in front of these crowds… it's incredibly special," he said, the night before hitting a 22-ball half-century. "The passion over here is second to none."
Back home in the UK, KKR are being supported remotely by Nathan Leamon, Wilde's predecessor with England. James Bell, a psychologist who works regularly with England teams, is available to RCB's players remotely, before joining them during their stretch of five consecutive away games.
Welcome to the IPL, England-style. Eight years ago, after England failed to reach the quarter-finals in an abject ODI World Cup, only two of their players -
Ravi Bopara and
Eoin Morgan - made an appearance in the IPL, and contributed 332 runs and six wickets between them.
Now, there are Englishmen playing key roles at almost every franchise - both on and off the pitch. "It's been a big shift," says
Moeen Ali, who has played in each of the last six IPL seasons. "Before, you had some English guys playing but definitely not as many as you would do now."
On Monday,
Chris Jordan became the 17th England player to have been under contract at some stage in IPL 2023, a record for a single season. Nine of the league's ten teams have fielded at least one Englishman over the last six weeks; the only exception, Gujarat Titans, have one as their director of cricket.