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[poondu]

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7011937.stm

After the disastrous, 50-over World Cup in the West Indies where the death of a coach, an absurdly stretched-out schedule, exorbitantly priced tickets, and the early exit of India and Pakistan meant that everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, the ICC Twenty20 World Cup has been an administrator's dream.

The matches have attracted respectable crowds, the South Africans have been efficient hosts, the abbreviated format which many thought would make cricket a meaningless slugfest has resulted in matches played on remarkably level terms with canny bowlers more than holding their own against rampant batsmen.

Best of all the final played on Monday featured the fiercest rivalry in cricket, which, happily for the ICC, is also its biggest money-spinner.

It was an improbable outcome.

No expectations

The Pakistan team has been beset by disciplinary problems, it was bringing in a new coach and its batting stalwarts had either retired or been deemed unsuitable for this ultra-compact version of the game.

The Indians had never played a Twenty20 match. Unlike England (which pioneered the format) and South Africa, there is no domestic tournament in India built around the new format.

  This radical abbreviation has invested Twenty20 cricket with the violent urgency of a baseball match where everything has to go
 
The Indian cricket board had been less than enthusiastic about Twenty20 because conventional ODIs [one-day internationals] have been such a reliable source of revenue.

Nobody in India, as India's captain MS Dhoni keeps pointing out, expected the Indian team to make any headway in the tournament.

And now they've gone and won it by a whisker after a heart-stopping final.

What does this mean for the future of cricket?

 
For Indians, the games are similar in length to a Bollywood film
Well, first off it means that the format is here to stay. History is a contingent business: if India and Pakistan had exited early there would be no exulting South Asian crowds feeling they owned Twenty20, no queues of companies snaking around the block fighting to sponsor future matches or to run commercials in the cricket breaks.

India's massive television audience likes winning: it'll stay up nights watching anything that looks respectably international and where India takes the prize. By winning the inaugural Twenty20 World Cup, the Indian team has secured that format's future.

What is its impact on the other forms of the game - the 50-over ODI and the five-day Test match - likely to be?

Kris Srikkanth, a former Indian captain, said on television recently that contrary to popular belief, Twenty20 was no threat to Test cricket because the two formats were so different. Srikkanth believes that the format at risk is the 50-over ODI.

Violent urgency

There have been complaints for a while now about the predictability of limited-overs cricket, particularly about the lull in the middle overs of the game when batting teams nudge and consolidate.

Twenty20 seems to have taken care of that problem by simply eliminating the boring overs of that middle passage. This radical abbreviation has invested Twenty20 cricket with the violent urgency of a baseball match where everything has to go.

Remarkably, Indian cricket administrators for once are in a state of high readiness, perfectly poised to take advantage of the euphoria and enthusiasm for Twenty20 that the World Cup win has generated.

 
A successful Twenty20 league will make cricket less top-heavy
First Zee, a television company, then the Indian cricket board, because of Zee's challenge to the board's monopoly over the game in India, had announced Twenty20 leagues before the World Cup began.

Both Zee's ICL (Indian Cricket League) and the Board's IPL (Indian Premier League) plan to create league cricket based on franchised clubs modelled on the football leagues of Europe. The clubs will be free to buy players from anywhere in the world.

Were either of these league competitions to catch on (and given the World Cup win, this must be an odds-on possibility), the "honorary" nature of India's cricket administration and the shamateur status of its domestic cricketers will be a thing of the past.

A commercially viable Twenty20 league will make cricket less top-heavy, less dangerously dependent on revenues from international competition.

Ruining the longer game?

But won't its success spell ruin for the longer game?

If Twenty20 became entrenched as the profitable form of the domestic game, how long would it be before the three-day first-class competition, already nearly moribund in India from lack of spectator interest, became extinct?

This might create a generation of batsmen without a defensive technique. And, likewise, it might shape a generation of bowlers that looks to contain runs instead of bowling to take wickets.

Worse, it could encourage bits-and-pieces players at the expense of specialist batsmen and bowlers, who are the glory of the longer game.

Not inevitably. The advent of limited-overs cricket actually improved Test cricket by raising scoring rates, transforming fielding standards and nearly eliminating the interminable draw played out over five indecisive days.

 
Twenty20 could be a huge commercial success

Twenty20 could take this evolution to a new level.

And the concern about the decline of specialist skills is a false alarm because Pakistan, who so nearly won the tournament, made the finals by playing five frontline bowlers who set out to take wickets.

Also, as Pakistani blogger Kamran Abbasi, has pointed out, Twenty20 cricket is the closest international cricket comes to the game that amateurs play in their neighbourhoods. How can that be bad?

'Evening show'

In fact, Chris Cairns, the fine New Zealand all-rounder, thinks that Twenty20 might herald a convergence of Test cricket and the limited-overs game.

He speculates that five years from now Twenty20 cricket could mutate into a four-innings game that would replicate the form of the Test match in miniature.

What the limited-overs game lacks currently, says Cairns, is the second chance, the shot at redemption that makes Test cricket such a satisfyingly complicated game.

If each side had two innings, played alternately, you could build that into the limited-overs game and still be done with the match in under five hours.

However, the great advantage of the Twenty20 format as it presently exists is that the spectator can be done with a game in three hours.

For Indian audiences, used to the long feature film, this is exactly the length of an "evening show".

If everything goes right and club cricket takes off, Indians might actually see their stadiums upgraded and tickets properly sold.

Once that happens there's a real chance that urban Indians might begin to watch cricket in their neighbourhoods in the way Londoners queue up to watch Arsenal or Chelsea.

None of this might happen: but it's a tribute to the massive potential of this fledgling format that level-headed players, administrators and journalists have begun dreaming.

Mukul Kesavan's book on cricket, Men in White, was published by Penguin India this year.

[kban1]

The twenty20 age begins

Twenty20 cricket, contrary to the fears of purists, has plenty of subtlety and nuance, and will continue to evolve

Amit Varma

Monday has long passed, and the immediate elation around India’s victory in the Twenty20 World Cup has abated. Yet, I still feel excited, and certain of the historical significance of this win. In 1975, when the first One Day International (ODI) World Cup took place, it seemed like a tamasha to everyone, a passing fancy. Today, it is a huge deal, and West Indies are inscribed as its first winners. I’m certain that the Twenty20 World Cup will be as important one day, and India will be remembered as its first champions. That’s quite something.

My excitement is not just about India winning. I am as charged up about Twenty20 cricket, though it is a format I was initially suspicious of, being a purist in love with the intricate and elongated dramas of Test cricket. My preconceptions about Twenty20 cricket have been—forgive the cliché, but I can’t resist this one—knocked for a six.

I believed that it was a sloggers’ game, and that bowlers were doomed. That is clearly not true. Bowlers played a key role in every victory in this World Cup, and players like R.P.Singh, Daniel Vettori, Stuart Clark, Umar Gul and Irfan Pathan (in the final) showed that traditional bowling skills—as opposed to just pitching it full and hoping it doesn’t go for six—are central to this game. And slogging alone isn’t enough to do well—in fact, it’s an invitation to disaster, for canny bowlers will always lure sloggers out, and wickets hurt every team.

In the simplistic view of the cynics— and I was one myself—the three-hour version of cricket has no space for subtleties or nuance. I now disagree. Most other sports are played in shorter spans of time, and a 90-minute game of soccer and a three-set game of tennis have plenty of subtlety and nuance. Cricket has enough drama in its DNA to be enthralling in any span of time, and we got a demonstration of it during this World Cup.

Twenty20 cricket will evolve just as one-day cricket did. In the 1970s and 1980s, cricketers took a similar approach to an ODI as they did to a Test match. (Remember Gavaskar’s 36 not out in 1975, and Boycott and Brearley in the 1979 final?) It took time for players to figure out the game, for captains to develop strategies suited to 50 overs of play, for cricketers to work on skills tailored to this new form. Many of those—the quick singles, the sharp fielding, pacing a chase—transformed Test cricket as well.

Similarly, Twenty20 cricket has a grammar and rhythm of its own, with an increased urgency around each delivery, and players will soon adapt to it, and export those qualities to other forms of the game. There will be more 400-plus scores in one-day cricket, and an individual double-century is surely not far away. The mental framework of our international cricketers has been changed by Twenty20 cricket, and it will impact ODIs and Tests as well.

Contrary to what many expect, though, I don’t see Twenty20 cricket becoming the commercial heart of the international game anytime soon. This is simply because there are more commercial breaks in a one-day match. As long as ODIs have a following, cricket boards will schedule more of those, though that might change if ODIs go the way of Test matches in terms of viewership.

Twenty20 games can have a powerful impact on domestic cricket, though. At the moment, domestic cricket, particularly in the subcontinent, has a negligible following. Most of us don’t have the time to watch domestic games, especially as the international calendar is so crowded. Twenty20 cricket makes fewer demands on our time, and domestic Twenty20 tournaments, if well organized and promoted, should draw healthy audiences. That will also expose newer stars to the cricket-watching public.

Speaking of new stars, a big reason why this World Cup was so important for us was that it gave us a snapshot of the future. The decision by the Dravid-Tendulkar-Ganguly trio to withdraw from the tournament was a magnificent one for Indian cricket, as it gave us a chance to see what a young Indian team, without the baggage of the past, would look like. M.S. Dhoni’s team looked united, confident, devoid of politics and happy together.

That does not mean that we should discard the older players, for we need them in the season ahead, and should persist with them as long as they merit their place. But it does invalidate the argument that we should stick with our legends because the newcomers aren’t good enough. This tournament showed that we have eager, hungry young players waiting their turn, and any seniors who underperform should be shown the door—respectfully, but without regret.

I’m suspicious of false euphoria, and wary that I might fall prey to it myself. But I can’t help thinking that exciting times lie ahead for both India and the game of cricket. What do you think?

http://www.livemint.com/2007/09/27001259/The-twenty20-age-begins.html