Twenty20 is more like a crude edit

[Zakhmi]

Friday was a big night for cricket. A large, noisy gathering toasted the success of the happy band of international cricketers called ... the Yarras. Yes, it was presentation night at the club where I've been a member 15 years, and have an apparently eternal commission as vice-president. A genuinely global affair it was, too. Harry, our Kiwi clubman extraordinaire, was extravagantly toasted - deservedly so. Knockbax, our Yorkie quick bowler, told us we were all "roooobish" - deservedly so too. Aravind, in receiving the award for most ducks, narrated in hilarious detail the only innings in which he scored a run last season. Nashad, having won the bat raffle, touchingly described arriving from Dhaka five years ago knowing nobody in Melbourne; now, he said, he regarded us as family. Already, however, I'm struck by the fact that what I've enjoyed are those moments when Twenty20 has looked more like cricket rather than less. And this is a problem, because there simply aren't enough of them. Twenty20 is envisaged as a concentrated form of cricket, without the pauses and longueurs that test the patience and understanding of the uninitiated. But it's less concentrated than crudely edited, and what is missing are those aspects of the game that make it linger in the mind, that impress on the imagination, that take time to understand, that need effort to appreciate. It requires nothing of its audience but their attendance and their money. Apparently, the first episode of Shah Rukh Khan's Indianised version of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? airs later this week. Pardon me for thinking that Khan's two new presentations have a few things in common. The game's skills, meanwhile, have been massively rationalised. What we see in the main is not so much batting as hitting, not so much bowling as conveying. The batsman is assessed by the change his strokes are leaving out of six; the bowler is like the fall guy in a comic routine stoically awaiting the inevitable custard pie. For sure, the players are stars, personalities, megabuck entertainers. But to be great under such circumstances is next to impossible. The game is neither big nor deep enough. No thespian has achieved greatness from a career of sketches; no old master won admiration for a skill at silhouettes. Cricket has traditionally made welcome a wonderful variety of capabilities and temperaments. The swashbuckler will have his day, but likewise the gritty opening batsman, the middle-order nurdler, the doughty tailender; likewise, there are days that favour the purveyor of outswing, googlies, subtle left-arm slows. From the combination of 20 overs a side, flat pitches, white balls, and 70m boundaries, however, emerges what sort of cricketer? (In fact, you begin wondering which great past players would have found in Twenty20 a welcoming home. Kapil Dev, for sure. Maybe Sunil Gavaskar, when not in one of his obdurate moods. But can you see BS Chandrashekhar, Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna? Given the choice, would you select Gundappa Viswanath and Sanjay Manjrekar, or Sandeep Patil and Chandrakant Pandit?) The argument is advanced that this need not concern us: we are assured that Twenty20 will be only one of cricket's variants. There will still be Test cricket, first-class cricket, 50-over matches. Yet with the animal spirits of the market liberated, how realistic is this? Already players are falling over themselves to make IPL hay, egged on by managers taking a fair clip themselves. The likelihood is that the objective of the majority of cricketers worldwide will become not to play dowdy old domestic cricket that leads on to hoary old national honours, the longer forms of the game that prepare the most finished practitioners. The economically rational behaviour will be to adapt their methods to maximise their IPL employment opportunities. Consider for a moment just who is closer to the role model of the moment: is it Rahul Dravid, the "Wall" with his 10,000 Test runs, or Yuvraj Singh, who once hit six sixes in an over? Who will a rising young cricketer earn more by emulating? If maximising individual income is what matters - and if any cricketer feels otherwise, he is keeping such a heresy to himself - then Yuvraj might well be the cookie-cutter cricketer of the next decade. Twenty20 has rightly been called a batsman's game, but it is a very particular kind of batsman: the type whose game is built on eye and strength. If a new Dravid were to begin emerging now, I suspect he would face a career as a second-class cricket citizen. more... Gideon Haigh is a cricket historian and writer