DALLAS, TEXAS – JUNE 5: Saurabh Netravalkar of USA meets his teammates during a net session as part of the ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup West Indies & USA 2024 at the Grand Prairie Cricket Stadium on June 5, 2024 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Matt Roberts-ICC/ICC via Getty Images)
CPI via Getty Images
A new documentary on Saurabh Netravalkar is not really about cricket. It’s about what happens when someone chooses inner work and what that offers to every leader navigating a data-flooded, data-hungry world. by meaning.
Cricket is the second most watched sport on the planet. It is followed by approximately 2.5 billion people, concentrated in South Asia, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and Australia. In countries like India and Pakistan, it is actually not a sport at all. It is a shared nervous system, something closer to religion than recreation.
The United States has largely stayed outside that world. Until June 2024.
Most people outside the cricket world had never heard of Saurabh Netravalkar before that month. Then came a single that changed that.
The setting was the T20 Cricket World Cup, co-hosted by the United States for the first time in the history of the sport. The opponent was Pakistan, one of the most historic teams in international cricket, a nation where the game functions as a national identity.
Both teams finished on 159. What followed was a super over: six balls a side, all decided in about four minutes. The US set a target of 18. Netravalkar then bowled Pakistan, conceding only 13, and the US won by five runs.
The United States cricket program had existed for decades in almost total oblivion. Pakistan had been playing international cricket since 1952. The result reverberated around the world.
What almost no one knew was who Netravalkar really was. Not just a cricketer. Software engineer at Oracle. A man who had been removed from competitive cricket in India a decade earlier, he emigrated to the United States, earned a master’s degree at Cornell, navigated a visa lottery he had already lost once, and rebuilt an athletic career in a country where cricket barely registers on the cultural radar. He’d done it while writing code by day, bowling in weekend leagues, and slowly becoming the captain of a team most Americans couldn’t have named.
Adam Leipzig knew a story when he saw one.
Leipzig has been making films for decades that operate in a different register than their surface subject: National Geographic articles, large documentary productions, works that use the specific to reach the universal. He has helped bring to life more than forty acclaimed films, including the Oscar winner. March of the Penguins, Dead Poets Society, Tito, The Way Backinter alia.
When he heard Netravalkar’s story, he immediately recognized that cricket was almost beside the point. “I don’t think you need to know cricket to like this movie,” he told me. “You yourself have to fight with life.”
What Leipzig and director Pierre Friquet did is not a sports documentary. It uses cricket in the same way that the best sports films use their sport, as a pressure chamber in which something essentially human becomes visible. The super over is in the movie. That’s not what the movie is about.
The structure chosen by Leipzig announces this immediately.
The structural choice
Leipzig made a deliberate decision to fracture time rather than tell the story chronologically. Each ball of the super over becomes a gate, forward and backward in time, so the viewer understands that the eight balls (two of them were wide and had to be bowled again) are not destiny. They are the container. The point is all they have.
Most sports documentaries are based on victory. The championship is the top; everything above is prologue. Leipzig reversed this. “Great movies start in the middle of things,” he told me. I wasn’t describing a film technique. I was describing a philosophy.
That’s a harder choice than it seems. The obvious version of this film, the rise of Netravalkar, the story of the immigrant, the Oracle engineer who defeated Pakistan, writes and sells itself. Leipzig knew that version. He chose not to.
“We didn’t want to be boring,” he said. “We wanted to tell a psychological story.”
This is what distinguishes true creative authority from competent execution. Competent execution gives the audience what they expect. Creative authority gives them something they didn’t know they needed. Leaders are constantly faced with this choice: the obvious version of strategy, reorganization, hiring, and most choose the familiar because the familiar is defensible. Leipzig was not interested in defending itself.
Two operating systems, one person
Netravalkar has held two identities simultaneously for most of his adult life: software engineer at Oracle, lead bowler for the United States cricket team. The easy argument is that one subsidized the other. The truest image, which the documentary shows, is that they were never in competition.
“I call it context switching,” Netravalkar told me. It is a term borrowed from software engineering, the mechanism by which a processor handles multiple tasks by rapidly shifting all attention between them, never dividing it. When you bowl, cricket achieves everything. The ball is released. The outcome is no longer under your control. It goes off. When you code, cricket doesn’t exist.
Leipzig describes its own version of the same operating principle. “I call it serial single-tasking. I don’t think humans multitask well. When we try, we do a sub-par job.”
Two people from completely different disciplines came to the same conclusion through different paths. This is the pattern that engagement research keeps emerging: Total attention, not fragmented presence, is what separates people who maintain high performance from those who simply maintain it. What Netravalkar developed through sport, Leipzig developed through cinema. The principle is the same. The ball is thrown. Walk back.
The desert of meaning
There is a line that Leipzig offered that stopped me. We were discussing AI, its growing presence in corporate life, the post-pandemic data on increased loneliness, anxiety and stress that Gallup has tracked in 150 countries, numbers that were already rising before the pandemic and have accelerated since.
“We are inundated with data,” he said, “but we live in a desert of meaning.”
I was talking about the movie. He was also describing something much bigger.
Netravalkar came to the same territory from a different direction. In recent years, he has been reading deeply Indian philosophical texts, the Bhagavad Gita, Vedantic philosophy and practicing Satvic Yoga. He speaks of this not as spiritual practice but as cognitive reorientation. “The act itself is the fruit,” he said, invoking the concept of nishkam karmaaction without attachment to the result. “If you love the act itself, just show up every day.”
What you are describing is an operating system in which the work itself is the reward, the present action is complete, and the external result is information rather than verdict. It sounds old because it is. It also sounds like something executives fumble with when they talk about purpose, meaning, and sustainable performance and can’t name it. The fastest-growing issues in Gallup’s post-pandemic data are not problems that technology can solve. Loneliness is not an efficiency problem. Disconnection from meaning is not a workflow problem. Netravalkar’s story is, in essence, a case study of someone who chose inner work when the external structures collapsed and found that the inner work became complicated in a way that the external structures never did.
What the movie is really about
Leipzig was explicit. “This movie is not about victory. It doesn’t peak in a particular event. It’s about winning in the game of life, which has nothing to do with the score.”
They designed it that way from the beginning. Animated sequences are the clearest sign of intent. Instead of recreating events that couldn’t be filmed, they go somewhere the cameras can never reach, inside Netravalkar’s psychology during the years of failure. A young man fighting demons in a field, represented in images that are between memory and threat. They’re deliberately unsettling, and the discomfort is the point: what led to that super ending wasn’t just skill and preparation. It was everything those sequences show.
Netravalkar was withdrawn from Mumbai cricket at a crucial time in his development. Two college rejections followed. He watched his peers in India receive promotions and his peers in the United States complete their graduate degrees. “I felt like I missed the bus,” he said, “in both places.” Then came Cornell’s acceptance. Then, a US visa lottery that he had already lost once. Then a spot on the US national cricket team, building in parallel with a growing career at Oracle.
He didn’t design this. He persisted in it. There is a distinction and it is important. Engineering involves a plan. Persistence implies something more difficult, a continuous movement in the absence of certainty, a continuous investment in work when the outcome is unknowable.
The Super Over, revisited
When the film returns to the final dance, and it does, because the structure demands it, the viewer has been somewhere completely different. Bombay. Cornell. A bathroom where a young man rehearses code problems out loud for himself. A seven-hour interview in which things began to flow. A man who comes to peace with his own failures not because they don’t matter, but because they became material.
The super victory was real. The celebration was earned. And Netravalkar is clear-eyed about his place in its larger story. In his last World Cup match, played in Mumbai, a dream scenario come true, he did not perform well. He said it clearly. Then he said this: “It’s not about that. It’s about the larger purpose of life and these intrinsic triumphs and how they keep happening.”
This is not a cliché about perspective. It is a description of someone who has actually relocated the marker.
The documentary is not really about cricket. It’s about what builds up in a person during the years when nothing is going right, and what that buildup becomes when the time finally comes. Every leader knows that accumulation is happening somewhere in their organization, in people who are still walking when they have every reason to stop.
The question is whether the environment they have built can see it. Or if you only know how to look at the scoreboard.
The Long Game: Saurabh Netravalkar, Between Two Worlds, follows Oracle engineer’s journey to Team USA cricket stardom, premieres June 17 on Willow TV and June 18 on Amazon Prime Video