Keep Your Eye on the Ball
While every cricket commentator out there has his (and it almost always is a ‘his’) opinion on this subject, some serious discussion needs to be had about whether or not this format is the inevitable rollercoaster everybody has made it out to be.
Since I cannot rely on some massive poll of the cricket audience (none of which, it appears, read this blog), I can only rely on the cricket produced, which has been less or just as interesting as 50-over version. Twenty20 represents in large part a a resigned acceptance that the point of the game — the game itself — has lost its allure. Organizers try to compensate with music and dancing girls, but boards would do better to just improve the state of cricket itself, reducing schedules or fixing the rules to make a bowler want to wake up in the morning.
Sambit Bal, writing for Cricinfo, has not kept us in the dark about how tortured he feels about the sport’s latest fad. On the one hand, as a veteran fan of cricket, he suspects that the format’s quick-bang structure, along with all the dancing girls and DJ cuts, misses out on what fans have long suggested is cricket’s finer traits: the length and duration, the nuances and subtleties, the prospect of man fighting against the elements and time at the crease. Only in cricket, it seems, can an athlete be rightly credited for staying longer in play, sometimes regardless if the sportsman has done much of anything while playing (see the case of Chanderpaul v. England, 2007).
And yet, Bal seems certain that he must like Twenty20 because it is “here to stay.” Now, aside from whether or not Bal is correct in not completely embracing Twenty20 (which we will deal with later), we have to first decide if this is, in fact, the future of cricket.
The evidence for this argument is by no means bare: the crowds love it in South Africa, as they have in the West Indies and England (though audiences are coming down a bit in the last case as of late). Four cricket boards recently announced that they would set up a Twenty20 “Champions League,” modeled, as all things in cricket nowadays must be, on European football, with similarly mind-boggling sums of money to play for. Surely, these boards are betting, as did Subash Chandra when he set up his rival league, that there is an audience for this show, and if so, much money to be made.
On the other hand, however, Bal’s own anecdotal evidence contradicts his argument: as he says, only two matches in this entire tournament have been memorable, and while his son, a football-lover, tuned in to watch India v. Pakistan, it is just as likely he did so because it was a down-to-the-wire match, bowl-out or otherwise. Now, surely, stadium audiences might love this thing, but that isn’t where all the money is (it might be at some point, if this franchise model is for real, but television still rules the roost). Meanwhile, in India, where all the money is, Twenty20 has yet to get anywhere.
Besides, more people watching Twenty20 does not necessarily mean that they are done with the 50-over version. It might suggest — and this is actually more worrying — that 50-over-games just haven’t delivered what they used to, with no fault on the part of its length. Instead, with batting sides almost always with the upper-hand, scores have run up faster than a mountain-climber, and Australia’s utter dominance of the sport does nothing for spectators.
Indeed, commentators often suggest that a crowd has been “thoroughly entertained” when both teams put up massive scores, but that is just not true: the best matches are evenly balanced between bat and ball, and watching a bowler beat a batsman time and again is just as interesting as seeing the ball fly over the boundary fence.
As for the notion that Twenty20 somehow equalizes the sport, again, nothing bears this out: yes, Bangladesh beat the West Indies, but in this day and age, that doesn’t say much. And yes, Zimbabwe triumphed over Australia, but that might just have been a freak accident. That it went on to lose the rest of its matches, as did Bangladesh (so far), Scotland and Kenya, suggests that not enough equalization has occurred.
To conclude, crowds may certainly endorse Twenty20 now or in the future for reasons intrinsic to this format: briefer, higher-adrenaline, dancing girls, whatever. But it is also possible that we pushed them into this situation. After such an unbelievably dull World Cup and an overdose of mediocre ODI series of late, no audience can be blamed for looking for the next thing. If cricket commentators aren’t bemoaning the state of Twenty20, they complain about the 50-over version being just as problematic of late. Boards might think they’re dumping a dead horse for a new cash-cow, when in reality, they are just swapping one victim of mismanagement for another potential one.
It is just possible that in a few years, we will be back where we started, with a bored audience asking for something new just for the sake of novelty.
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