If there is one man for whom most of the old-fashioned cricket lovers would gladly put up a ‘wanted dead or alive’ bounty sign, or burn in effigy without a second thought, that man would surely be the little known Stuart Robertson. The Twenty20 curse, well disguised in the beginning as a boon to county cricket, was his brain child, and as marketing manager of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in 2001, it was he who sold the idea to the chairmen of the counties.
The latter, worried by thinning ground attendances and falling revenues, passed the measure, most reluctantly it would appear, from the narrow 11-7 vote in favour. The skeptics like former England captain Brian Close argued even then, ‘this is rubbish, it will ruin techniques’. A decade down the road, the Twenty20 has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its creator, or the budgets of the administrators, and is tending to overshadow the traditional game with its crash-slam-bang action.
The aperitif has turned into the main course on the cricket menu.
Is it not a crying shame that this mockup version, with its crass commercialism (including scantily clad dancers), its worse than agricultural shots, and millions of dollar largesse, should become synonymous with the great game of cricket, especially for the uninitiated and the younger generation, instead of the sober traditional formats of the game?
The Twenty20 replaced the Benson and Hedges Cup, a one-day cricket competition of 50 overs, whose sponsorship deal expired in 2002, and the new format was first tried out in 2003. That year English county championship had been dominated (for once in the proper cricketing sense) by a Pakistani, who had been cold-shouldered by his own country. The diminutive leggie Mushtaq Ahmad spun his adopted county Sussex to its first ever county championship success in its 164 –year history. He baffled the batsmen with his classical flighted leg spinners, and a well-disguised googly, and was labelled ‘the portly wizard of Lahore’ by an English journalist. In 16, four-day matches, Mushtaq bowled an astronomical 836.3 overs, topping the bowling averages with 103 wickets, the first to reach a 100 since 1998 and the first spinner since Anil Kumble in 1995 to achieve the feat. He was also named Player of the Season by the English Professional Cricketers Association.
But despite all Mushtaq’s heroics, there was a rival. In its first outing, the Twenty20 layout proved to be the real success story of the 2003 English cricket season. As a newspaper report bragged then, ‘the players loved it, the supporters loved it (and there were more than a quarter of a million of them), the counties loved it, the bosses loved it. Surrey won it’. The competition was billed as ‘twice the action, half the time and three times the attendance’. It attracted an average of ‘5,330 spectators per match in June, while the competition it replaced, the Benson and Hedges Cup, drew only 1500 per match’. It is ironic that this stepchild or aberration originated in the conservative and traditional soil of the ‘Mother Country’ and the first Twenty20 matches were played on historic grounds steeped in cricket lore. On July 15, 2004, the hallowed turf of Lord’s too hosted its maiden match of the new format, Middlesex versus Surrey, drawing a crowd of 26,500 – the ‘largest attendance in a county cricket game other than an ODI final since 1953’.
Moneybags time had come to cricket in a big way.
Thereafter the Twenty20 genre grew by leaps and bounds: the inevitable inaugural Twenty20 World Cup, under the ICC auspices, was held in 2007 in South Africa, and is now a regular (lucrative, all round) biennial fixture in the cricket calendar. In 2008, the US billionaire, Allen Stanford made instant millionaires of some England and Stanford Superstars team players in five Twenty20 matches, and then turned himself in after charges of fraud and money-laundering were framed against him in 2009 – no surprises there! The start of a Test series is now usually preceded by a couple of Twenty20s to set the ball rolling, so to speak, and every cricket playing country has its own domestic tournament. The IPL and the Australian ‘Big Bash’ promise the top names in cricket and fast-paced action to a growing number of devotees.
Like the proverbial camel which initially stuck only its neck in the tent, but later on slowly nudged out the rightful owner, the Twenty20 genre, like a Qabza quadruped, threatens to overthrow the true Test and three/four day first class formats. At one time, there was even a clamour to dump the fifty-over ODIs, as it had been rendered ‘obsolete’.
But there has also been a bitter harvest. Many cricketers (not all of them senile) but nursing injuries have opted out of the game prematurely to prolong their careers in the lucrative ‘circus’. Adam Gilchrist, a case in point, even called for Twenty20 to be included as an Olympic sport! It was absurd to see Sri Lanka beaten in the recent Tests series against an Australian side apparently comprised only of Mike Hussey, because their star bowler, Lalith Malinga, had retired from Tests, and was performing magnificently – only in the shorter versions.
Far from ‘raising the bar’ in the ‘fitness, agility, fielding and reaction time’ of the players, the new format has created another dubious record: that of injuries galore. The cricket played at breakneck speed may not have resulted in any broken necks yet (still, a likelihood considering the contorted action of some of the shots being played!) but it has contributed to stress fractures, muscle problems, niggling complaints and long lay offs. The disastrous Indian tour to England this summer highlighted this medical factor. The post IPL fatigue laid low many of the senior Indian players, and contributed in some degree to the drubbing in the Tests and the ODIs. In fact, India remained winless on the tour.
Another facet that emerged from the Indian tour was that however brilliantly an upcoming player may perform in the Twenty20 he is not up to facing the Test match challenge. Despite all the IPL’s popularity since its launch, the ‘freestyle’ form of cricket was unable to fill the vacuum created by injuries to leading Indian players. There was no backup, no second line of players available for the serious business of Test cricket from the vast pool of young talent in the IPL, which routinely performs great feats– only in the allotted twenty overs, it seems.
Belatedly, the founder of slapstick cricket too is having second thoughts about his invention and warning against ‘overkill’. He would much prefer it to be restricted to domestic tournaments only, as it was initially ‘devised to address the declining audiences in county cricket’. In a 2010 interview, he remarked, ‘I don’t mind Twenty 20s being used as a curtain–raiser for an international series, to have one or two to whet the appetite for more cricket coming up, so long as they don’t overdo it. If nothing else there is a risk of there being too much Twenty 20’. The risk has become a reality. The genie has escaped from the bottle. Can it be lured back, the lid closed tightly and the magic spell erased from memory? A tribute here to friend M.A Niazi, a true and steadfast cricket connoisseur, who never did a wicked thing and never watched a Twenty20 game.
