Chanting in cricket: “It needs to come from the fans….you can’t create it in corporate boardroom”

“The pants are red, the shirt is blue. The golden lion shining through. We are RCB and we are playing bold. Go to the final on our own. A finer kit you will never see….like you’ll never see. I think it’s quicker,” Royal Challengers Bangalore captain Faf du Plessis halted for a moment and explained to his teammate, David Willey the precise pace for a bit during the team’s song. Off they went again, “A finer team there’ll never be. Those other teams don’t bother me. From RCB, I am proud to be.” The rest of the players would join them for the whole bit followed loud RCB chants in sync with claps. The dressing room celebrations at the Chinnaswamy Stadium felt like a page out of football. A sport heavy on songs and chants, from the fans and the players.
RCB weren’t the only ones to do so in IPL 2023. Sunrisers Hyderabad posted a similar video after their first win of the season. So did Kolkata Knight Riders, featuring team owner Shahrukh Khan. An eyebrow raiser however, was the fact that all the songs weren’t the ones commonly associated with the respective franchises. The KKR players didn’t sing Korbo Lorbo Jeetbo, perhaps the most commonly hummed IPL team song since season one with largely hindi lyrics and a Bengali chorus. It was rather another English chant, so alien to the players and the support staff that it had to be sung with a constant eye on the lyrics. A staged act rather than an organic one.
“Chanting has to be contextual and organic,” Andrew Lawn, author of the book ‘We Lose Every Week: The Hory of Football Chanting’ tells The Indian Express. “It needs to come from the fans and not be manufactured, or it smacks of being inauthentic and sterile. The best chants are unique to a moment in time, which you can’t create in a corporate boardroom.”

Over the course of its hory, IPL has had plenty of references to the other 11-a-side sport. Virat Kohli has taken to tapping the RCB badge on his shirt after scoring fifties. Hardik Pandya and KL Rahul exchanged shirts after a game between their franchises and the latter suggested, “It will be nice to collect some jerseys and bring that tradition to cricket as well.” Aditya Tare termed his winning six against Rajasthan Royals as the equivalent of a ‘golden goal at a FIFA World Cup’.
Chants however, have the ability to form a unique emotional connection between the teams and those supporting them.
The beautiful game
“Chanting at football is all about identity creation,” states Lawn. “It is about celebrating the thing (the team, the place or the adversity) that brings all these people, from completely different walks of life, together in pursuit of a common goal – the ‘us’.”
Liverpool Football Club’s, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ is among the most iconic songs in the hory of the game, transcending from the field to firmly entrenching itself into the mythos of the city itself. After the tragic events at Hillsborough in 1989, where 96 fans lost their lives as a result of human crush during the FA Cup semifinal between the Reds and Nottingham Forest, the song became a message of hope to a city deep in grief.

“For there to be an ‘us’, there needs to be a ‘them’ and that is why you also get lots of chants mocking the opposition,” believes Lawn.
‘Glory Glory Man United’, associated with Liverpool’s fierce rivals in England, is often twed the opposing supporters to ‘Who the F**k are Man United’. The latter is also sung the United supporters as sarcasm when they are winning against a rival team.
“Chants celebrate the things we have in common and ridicule the things that differentiate our clubs. In today’s money-driven, consumer society they also provide an outlet for fans to voice their opposition to unpopular decisions made the club. It used to be that clubs relied on ticket money to fund them, so you could dissent boycotting games, but TV money has replaced that so now, the only option is to chant,” Lawn adds.
The origin stories of the songs trace back to decades with large traces of happenstance. Liverpool’s YNWA first premiered on Broadway as part of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show, Carousel in 1945. The song retained its popularity during the 1950s, and in 1963, Gerry And The Pacemakers, a local Merseyside band sang a cover for it.
In the 60s, the Anfield stadium in Liverpool was the only one to have a public address system and would play the Top 10 songs in the charts to entertain the fans pre-matches. This is where the song first seeped into the collective consciousness of Merseyside, with the cover Gerry And The Pacemakers staying on top of the chart for about month, and blared out during match days at Anfield.
“Chanting at football is all about identity creation,” states Lawn. “It is about celebrating the thing (the team, the place or the adversity) that brings all these people, from completely different walks of life, together in pursuit of a common goal – the ‘us’.” (Photo: Andrew Lawn)
Manchester United’s GGMU was written Herman Hermits’ Frank Renshaw before the 1983 FA Cup final pitting the Red Devils against Brighton & Hove Albion. In 2007, a full-length song was released in the style of the American Civil War song ‘The Battle Hymn Of The Republic’ and recorded The World Red Army, becoming a cult symbol at the Theatre Of Dreams. The original song has the chorus of ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah’ but the supporters of the club replace the Hallelujah with the abbreviated name of Manchester United i.e. MU.
Tottenham Hotspur have been using their own iteration of the song throughout their hory with ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah’ first sung the Spurs supporters in 1960. ‘Glory Glory Tottenham Hotspur’ was born before the FA Cup final of 1981 when the Tottenham squad along with Chas & Dave released the song as a single.
Not a first for cricket
Lawn believes, “Chanting is a part of cricket, but it’s different. Partly because of the not-so-dynamic nature of the game, but also because fans aren’t segregated in the same way they are in football stadiums – that makes for a less tribal, hostile atmosphere.”
Less hostile doesn’t mean no hostility though. Mitchell Johnson would know from the 3-1 Ashes loss to England at home. “He bowls to the left. He bowls to the right. That’s Mitchell Johnson, his bowling is sh*te,” sang the traveling English fans to target Australia’s left-arm quick during the tour down under. More personal jibes were taken, “His mother hates his missus. His missus hates his mother. They all hate one another, the Johnson Family.”

Remember the Rishabh Pant rendition of ‘I just don’t think you understand’ from the Indian fans during the 2019 tour of Australia. “He’ll hit you for a six. He’ll basit your kids. We’ve got Rishabh Pant.”
“That kind of support takes a long time to build up because it is built on stories passed down from generation to generation,” Lawn says. “I think that’s why international cricket has that allure, because you can link players down through the generations and there is that (forced) loyalty to one team.” As opposed to franchise cricket, where most players feature for multiple teams across leagues through the calendar year.

The allegiances may change in the years to come with franchise cricket occupying more and more space in the cricket calendar. The scenes from IPL dressing rooms this season will be more frequent. Indian franchise owners invested in teams across multiple leagues on the world map. There is an important chord at play here though. Are English songs/chants, rather than the ones in regional languages of the IPL teams, the way to relate to a more global audience and cater to the overseas players? Lawn disagrees, “Chants have to have a local flavor. They celebrate the place, the city or the region – all the things that make a place and it’s people unique. If you try and appeal to everybody, you appeal to no-one.”