True potential of Twenty20 is yet to be unleashed

t20 has the potential to be high-octane excitement.

 

By Madan Mohan

 

As India crash and collapse at England, there have been suggestions in the media that IPL has polluted cricket and made the players lose sight of their priorities. It’s an argument not entirely devoid of merit. Inevitably, there have also been suggestions that T20 itself is not even a valid form of the game and not much more than entertainment and that this fun form of the game should not be mistaken for the real one.

 

As much as I love Test cricket, I can hardly agree with such a statement. Yes, Twenty 20 cricket is different. But I don’t buy that that for that reason alone, it is by its very nature an inferior and impure form of the game. I do believe that in its own right, it has the potential to be high-octane excitement. By compressing the time factor involved in cricket the most, it also applies enormous pressure on players and makes every single delivery count much more than in the other forms of the game. It is the closest cricket will ever get to football (and I refuse to call it soccer!) and an ideal means of initiating new fans into the game. And as much as die-hard fans, of cricket or anything in general, love cosy elitist cliques, the need to get more people to like a game is at any given point very real and very necessary.

 

That said, do I yet find whatever T20 I have watched as appealing as Test cricket? Let alone Test cricket, I cannot think of a single T20 match I found as exciting as the 1999 World Cup semi-final between Australia and South Africa. Actually, I cannot think of any that matched the fever pitch of even South Africa’s successful chase of 400-plus against Australia in 2006, a match I liked much less than the World Cup encounter I mentioned. In general, I have found T20 one dimensional and predictable.

 

The novelty value that made the first T20 Cup in 2007 or the first IPL edition in 2008 interesting has worn off all too quickly. That is obviously so wrong, because I have never felt anything like that while watching ODIs and Tests and I have watched so many more of those.

 

The reason for that is T20 needs the right set of players to blossom. Test cricket’s evolution was gradual and drawn out and most of us are too young to remember much of it. It was a mature form of the game long before we began to watch it. ODIs benefited from West Indies’s outstanding performances in the first few World Cups, which opened up possibilities for the limited-overs version and paved the way for several batting and bowling innovations.

 

Unfortunately, by the time T20s came of age, the wonderful Australian side led by Ricky Ponting had begun to decline and their inexplicable disdain for the shortest form of the game didn’t help matters either. Hence, we have had lots of less-than-amazing players exploring what can be done with T20. And the results have so far not been all that overwhelming, at least for me.

 

And therein lies a larger problem faced by cricket. It is, of course, the sad decline of cricket in the Caribbean Islands. Would we really be so disdainful of T20s if Clive Lloyd, Vivian Richards, Malcolm Marshall and Michael Holding or Brian Lara and Curtly Ambrose from a later generation set it ablaze with dazzling displays? Would they too have not found a way with all their flair? Quite likely they would have.

 

I do not mean to introduce any racial angles to this discussion. But several sports, and especially athletics, have prospered because of Afro-American domination. It just seems to be something in their genes but whatever they touch, be it cricket or jazz, turns to gold. Basketball is one of the few team sports that they have taken to in a big way. And cricket unfortunately lost the West Indian marauders to basketball.

 

The emergence of the subcontinent as a force to reckon with in the ’90s and the region’s own obsession with ODI cricket helped cement its place as the cash cow of cricket. Along the way, several wonderful cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar, Wasim Akram, Inzamam-ul Haq, Sanath Jayasuriya and Lance Klusener blazed a trail of innovation and made the absence of the West Indians less conspicuous. But the subcontinent and Australia have yet to throw up a fresh generation of truly amazing limited-over specialists, barring maybe Lasith Malinga, who will take T20 to greater heights and its impact is felt in the increasing monotony of T20.

 

I confess the timing of this piece may be inopportune as a high-profile Test series — albeit that has failed to lived up to its expectations — is still under way. But I get a sense that cricket is susceptible to nostalgic overreach in the post-Lalit Modi world and there is too much harkening to go back to tradition. Healthy, thriving organisms do not yearn for days gone by; they embrace the now and eagerly look forward to the future.

 

Twenty 20 can be the harbinger of a bright future for cricket. Let’s wait some more for the players to wake up to its potential and make it something else.

 

(Madan Mohan, a 25-year old CA from Mumbai, is passionate about writing, music and cricket. Writing on cricket is like the icing on the cake.)

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