That means the winner is always right. India's win over Pakistan on Monday, in the first twenty-over (T20) World Cup cricket tournament, has thrown up several winners. The first winner is the idea itself, of a short, three-and-a-half hour game. The 50-over format lasts eight hours and a Test match is played over five days. The idea was invented in England to bring the crowds back to the game. It worked there and now it has at the international level also. India, as usual, has done it the other way around: it has won the World Cup first (all credit to the players) and will now introduce the 20-over format domestically, thanks in no small measure to the challenge from a rival body set up to end the monopoly of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. |
India's managers of the game did get one thing right for the tournament: they picked the right side. The average age was 24, compared to Australia's 28, South Africa's 27 and England's 26. Pakistan too had a young team, and therefore made it to a final that could have gone either way till the very end. This young team's success raises a barely visible question mark over the careers of the older stars of Indian cricket: who will be dropped from the winning team to accommodate them? Indeed, should anyone be dropped, especially if it means dropping at least three? Meanwhile, what is clear about T20 batting is that upper-arm strength will become more important; this version of the game may therefore begin to look more like baseball-brute strength and quick reflexes counting for more than technique and style. |
The second winner was bowling. The game has been promoted as a bang-away version but the truth, as the tournament showed, is that all those boundary hits notwithstanding, many bowlers did hold their own. Some credit may go to Venkatesh Prasad, the bowling coach, for getting India's bowlers to show greater discipline when it came to line and length. Indeed, there could now be a bowling renaissance as bowlers get forced to innovate in ways that they have not done so far. There remains a question mark over fielding: will it improve or deteriorate because, with so many hits to and over the boundary, the fielding challenge becomes more of an outfield exercise rather than a search for close-in catches. Whatever the future direction of the game, the T20 version will add new zing to cricket, and India is the world champion again after 24 years. |
Much now depends on the size of the grounds. These need to be standardised because if, as seems to be the current trend, they are made smaller to encourage hitting sixes, fielding will be at a discount. Accurate bowlers will be more in demand. Technology in umpiring "" for more than just line decisions, that is "" could also emerge as a winner because, in the T20 format, there is no room for things to even out. For this to happen though, the purists must realise that umpires have to regulate and act as judges. The two functions should not be confused. So the judging could "" it ought to "" shift mostly off-ground. It is also easy to see how advertising will change in favour of very short ads, because the time between overs has come down from 40 to about 27 seconds. Betting too will increase, and needs to be legalised. |