The spark of Port Elizabeth

Before the IPL got going, Lalit Modi made one of his Big Claims. After the opening weekend in Cape Town, he said, some venues had already sold 90% of their tickets. It was a vague enough statement to allow a subsequent climbdown if necessary, but the gist was clear enough: South Africans were flocking in advance to the IPL. The claim felt grossly optimistic at the time and subsequent matches - rain-affected, it must be said - in Durban, then back at Newlands, did little to dispel the suspicion. But yesterday in Port Elizabeth, things changed.

Arriving at the ground, I heard a father say to his disconsolate son: "They're sold out!" It was not quite Old Trafford 2005, when 10,000 fans were turned away at the gates for the last day of a thrilling Ashes draw, and the same number again told not to bother catching the tram from Manchester city centre. But it was significant enough. The people of Port Elizabeth had given up their Sunday to cheer on two notionally foreign sides containing only three South Africans - AB de Villiers of Delhi, and Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher of Bangalore. Presumably the presence of Kevin Pietersen helped too.

St George's has a capacity of 17,000, but since half-empty corporate boxes get factored into crowd equations in a manner befitting Fermat's Last Theorem, you just had to accept that 13,750 counted as a full house. But the point was this: it felt like a full house, and the absence of a couple of thousand of whatever counts as South African's version of the prawn-sandwich brigade did not make the blindest bit of difference.

Port Elizabeth has always cooked up an atmosphere. The brass band would fall foul of health and safety at Lord's or the Gabba, but here it is a focal point, carrying the crowd along with it and kickstarting any number of harmonious songs (is there a more musically literate crowd in world cricket now that Antigua's Gravy has retired?). The mood was something akin to the carnival Modi had promised. And the players appreciated it

"It was a fantastic crowd," said the Delhi captain Virender Sehwag. "I don't know if they were supporting Delhi or Bangalore, but they enjoyed the game very well, cheering for fours, sixes and when someone got out. I don't know who they were cheering for, but it was very supportive for the players."

Unwittingly, perhaps, Sehwag managed to pinpoint the essential weirdness of this tournament. Last year, Bangalore fans didn't know whether to weep salty tears or go berserk as Kolkata's Brendon McCullum whipped their new heroes for 158 not out on the tournament's opening night. The all-in enthusiasm spotted by Sehwag was a twist on that conundrum. No matter: this was the best atmosphere of the IPL to date. Bottle it, and Modi could really be on to a winner.