India played its first ever Twenty-20 (20-20? 20-Twenty?) international last week, against South Africa. In addition to the general frenzy in the way the cricket was being played, there was a panting fielding captain wired up and answering questions from commentators between deliveries, and in-game interviews conducted by a breathless Ravi Shastri with players in the dugout by the boundary (yes, there’s a dugout too). All meant to leave you with no doubt whatsoever that this new cricket format translates to minute-by-minute television excitement right through. Amusingly, the commentary box seemed to think that they too needed to keep up with the accelerated state of affairs on the field. You thus had Alan Wilkins exhorting the camera to “Bring on the dancing girls!” each time a panning shot spotted the cheerleaders by the boundary, and saying “It’s all happening!” about four times in his first half-hour in the commentary box. And Shastri pointing to the reasonably tuned-in but hardly mad-house crowd and telling us rather too loudly, “The crowd is going absolutely crazy behind me”, just as Zaheer Khan ran in to bowl another ball.The players however, at least for now, don’t seem to understand what the fuss is all about. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, in response to a question in an in-game interview (they worked in as many of these as they could!) about the team’s approach, gave the game away saying something to the effect of the team playing Twenty-20 now “just for enjoyment”, and that they might take it “seriously” in the future.
Twenty-20 is a captivating extension and exhibition of the dimensions that ODIs have given cricket over the years. But in the rush to make it as spectator-friendly as possible, there are some ‘innovations’ that will make a cricket-lover cringe. The official tie-breaker in a Twenty-20 game is a bowl-out (which actually made its first appearance in the rule book in ODIs, in the 2002 Champions Trophy). Current scores at the end of bowl-outs have been low enough to suggest that this is a legitimate contest of skill, rather than a situation where one team wins by default when the other misses. In my opinion, the reason bowl-out scores are low is that teams haven’t started practicing it as much as they eventually will (there is a Twenty-20 world cup in 2007); it is simply a matter of time before bowlers and teams get this down to a T, and reduce it to a farce. But then this isn’t even the point. The point is, a tie in cricket, unlike in, say, football or hockey, happens rarely enough for us to comfortably live with and acknowledge as a genuine result rather than have to play out a tie-breaker to decide a ‘winner’ (A tie in an elimination game, which, pre-bowl-out, went into a head-to-head/run-rate calculation, is still a superior way of deciding who progresses, because one team plays that last ball knowing it will lose if the scores are level, and hence knows it has to score/prevent that extra run to win).
A rule that has been incorporated into twenty-20 is the concept of a “free hit” off the ball following a no-ball (a batsman can get out only running). This, of course, is in addition to the free hit that you get off the no-ball (granted, between hearing the umpire’s call/catching the umpire’s hand go up and getting bat to ball, you’re given an almost infinitesimal time to react). Which means the bowler is asked to bowl the next delivery knowing fully well that he can’t get a wicket off it. Doesn’t this fly in the face of the very definition of the battle between batsman and bowler that each delivery is meant to be, the individual battles that a cricket match is made up of?
There’s already been much talk questioning the place of one-day internationals in the cricket calendar. It’s only a matter of time before the pendulum swings decisively towards Twenty-20, simply because of its marketability. But more importantly, Twenty-20 achieves, or will achieve, much of what one-day cricket was meant to achieve when it was conceptualized: a faster, limited-time game whose appeal lay in players having to make innovative plays with quick, on-their-feet thinking and decision-making. Somewhat like the inevitability of increased costs due to inflation, the even shorter duration and even faster approach to the game that this new format brings is purely reflective of the thirty years that have passed, between the advent of one-day cricket in 1975 and Twenty-20 now.
What I’m more interested in seeing is whether this will lead to something not as immediately obvious: will Twenty-20 (eventually, and unintentionally) alter the way we look at Test cricket and its place? When, and I do think it’s a when rather than an if, Twenty-20 does replace one-day international cricket, we will have on our plate a game that is of a significantly shorter duration than one-day cricket, and, coupled with its hit-or-miss nature, a format that offers much lesser scope for partnerships and bowlers bowling in tandem for any length of time. The concept of, and necessity for, a set team with strict batting and bowling orders becomes more fluid. This means there is a greater possibility of rotating and resting players and having a bigger roster without affecting the stability or performance of the team (as it might in a one-day scenario). You can now hold as many Twenty-20 matches as commercial interests ask for: a five-game or even a seven-game Twenty-20 series would be exponentially less demanding on players than a standard one-day series is currently.
I’d like to think that players and administrators will then start gravitating towards including a fuller quota of Test cricket on tours. Apart from being fresher because the rigours of Twenty-20 are not anywhere near the rigours of an ODI series, they will start to see that as exciting and as viable as Twenty-20 is, it offers their cricketers, their batsmen and bowlers, such limited scope. By stark contrast, they will also see how much more complete as a cricketing endeavour Test matches are. This isn’t going to happen overnight though: we’re going to see a long drawn-out period where the two shorter formats will compete for space. We’ll have tours with 3-5 one day matches and 3-5 Twenty-20 matches, apart from the three Test matches. Eventually, forces will dictate that twenty-20 overtakes and pretty much negates the idea of one-day cricket, and, sort of parallelly, this is when we will be drawn towards taking a fresh look at Test cricket. Not just because it is uniquely positioned to bring out and celebrate the nuances that define cricket - it would be naïve to expect a shift in that paradigm simply because of this; its something we’ve known all along really - but because cricket’s other prevailing form is such an obviously slapdash concoction, and we will treat it as such.
Also by ashwin
- World Cup on the tube - March 15th, 2007
- Southie Snack Attack - October 30th, 2006
- The Supermarket Surfer - 2 - October 2nd, 2006