Gideon Haigh | September 25, 2007
NOTHING succeeds like success, says the proverb. For confirmation, look no further than the cricket grounds of South Africa. Test matches there usually struggle to attract a quorum. For the past 10 days the grounds have brimmed with life and noise for a world championship of the game's newest variant, Twenty20: a heady mixture of thrills, spills and the epiphenomenon of mass marketing.
The conclusion, moreover, was close to ideal. Where the 50-over-a-side World Cup earlier this year was fatally undermined by the early exits of India and Pakistan, here those traditional antagonists reached the final, having earlier tied after 240 deliveries. The subcontinent is the hub of the game and cricket observes the golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules. India and Pakistan, and perforce the world, are about to go Twenty20 crazy.
In the excitement, Australians have been notable party poopers, and not merely because they went down to both finalists after being tripped up by Zimbabwe. Trying to sound enthused about the crowds in Johannesburg, Adam Gilchrist let his ambivalence hang out: "Er, yeah, yeah. It's um ... well. The more I play it, I am starting to, not so much like it as a player, but love watching it."
Andrew Symonds came straight out and called Twenty20 "a frustrating game because you can be beaten by the lesser sides", which "have to be good for a shorter period of time". In this they echo their captain, Ricky Ponting, who last year confessed: "I don't think I really like playing Twenty20 international cricket."
Nobody else shows quite the same candour, perhaps because Twenty20 is looming as a means by which the much-resented Australian grip on international cricket may be loosened, and perhaps also because of its looming booty.
A Champions Twenty20 League along the lines of rugby's Super 14s is promised a year hence: nine days, $US5 million ($5.7 million), involving teams from host India, Australia, England and South Africa, with corporates bidding for the right to field franchise teams selected from a pool of internationals.
For punters, Twenty20 has been a blast: a starburst of sixes, a welter of wickets and, not least, a farcical "bowl-out" during the finalists' first meeting where trembling players proved embarrassingly incapable of hitting a set of stumps.
Indeed, embarrassment is the essence of Twenty20. Players don't just fail, they are humiliated.
A promising young bowler, Stuart Broad, was smashed for six sixes in an over. A brilliant young batsman, Michael Clarke, faced only four balls during the entire tournament. Sri Lanka's able and stylish top order, which excelled in the World Cup and whose variety of strokeplayers is one of the pleasures of the modern game, committed batting harakiri in 10 overs. The fielding has been surprisingly ham-handed, with plenty of catches missed and only three taken in the slips in the 26 games preceding the final. Twenty20, then, turns a game of subtleties, intricacies and distant intimacies into a theatre of cruelty for television.
Cricket lovers underestimate this philosophical shift at their peril. Cricket has traditionally been a game for players, with everyone enjoying the scope and the time to show their own special skills. But this length, breadth and variety have made the game difficult to mass market.
When one-day cricket brought the spectators' understandable desire to see a result in a day into calculations, that balance was disturbed. "In cricket, the players are the boss," observed Peter Roebuck. "In one-day cricket, the game is the boss."
In Twenty20, that boss totes an MBA and a BlackBerry, and his concern is chiefly ratings rather than runs or wickets. Indeed, the format originated on the marketing whiteboards at the England and Wales Cricket Board four years ago as a means of attracting cricket "tolerators": sports watchers averse to the game who might consider going if it was shorter, sharper and noisier.
A novel idea, this: to redesign a game to the specifications of those who don't like it, rather like creating art for consumers who prefer pornography or composing music for listeners with a taste for cacophony.
But the practitioners' acquiescence is bought by an arrangement reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's principle for dealing with actors: "Pay them heaps and treat them like cattle."
So the administrators have a hit on their hands, a hit that will reverberate. We have already seen the best-case scenario: a successful tournament still tinged with novelty.
Through time, however, it is likely that the main beneficiaries will be commercial intermediaries.
Cricket will make a great deal of money in the short term, money it has no obvious need for and will mostly waste, and it will be left a coarser, crueller, crasser game as a result. Now that the Twenty20 world championship is over, another proverb comes to mind: be careful what you wish for.
I'm not sure why.
at Andrew Symonds + Matthew Hayden = asking for trouble
they keep going on about 'the future' and how in x number of years the Australian team will be weakened by inexperience, why not bring in a younger spinner to build experience now?
so much for challenging our batters. He's considered the best in the world now, and that performance was a massive let down... I want to see our top and middle order really put under pressure, hopefully India can deliver.
