"Late 2007 to 2009 was when I played my best cricket, after rejoining the national team" - Tatenda Taibu ©Getty
In this new Cricbuzz series - The IPL Benchwarmers - we talk to players who made it to the IPL alright, but didn't go very far, and were out of opportunities - and reckoning - sooner than they'd have liked.
In this ultra-professional age of Twenty20 cricket, in which the game is increasingly analysed to within an inch of its life, it's refreshing to return to the shortest format's roots and recall what the early days of the IPL were like. IPL squads these days are assembled on the back of hours and hours of statistical examination, highbrow tactical debate and attempts to control even the minutiae of a head-to-head encounter. But this was not the case in 2008, when the first edition of one of world sport's most successful events was effectively a game of real-life fantasy cricket played out by India's millionaires.
The extreme to which this went is brilliantly represented by the story of