INTO THE ’20S
A cricket format enters a decade named for it, writes Dan Liebke.
Boldly going into the T20 decade, by Dan Liebke.
What’s the future of T20s? More and more, teams are hiring nerds to analyse Expected Averages (EAs), True Strike Rates (TSRs), Pitch Ratings (PRs) and other Acronymified Cricket Measures (ACMs) in an attempt to finally elevate cricket to where it’s always yearned to be – a mathematically optimised algorithm for bat-and-ball sporting excellence.
But even as the analysts push T20s into deeply rigorous analytical territory, international boards tinker with the format to make it more accessible to the casual fan. And by “more accessible to the casual fan”, I mostly mean “shorter”. England is the chief culprit here, morphing T20 into an entirely new format – The Hundred – in which bowlers bowl ten-ball overs, batsmen score bonus runs for hitting the television drone, captains are permitted to switch out bowlers mid-over and teams are dressed up as branded packets of chips. (Only one of these is a fabrication. Can you guess which one?)
This is the tension that T20 will struggle with going forward – is it a serious form of the game deserving precise and detailed analysis? Or is it an entertainment vehicle existing solely to keep our minds off ... well, off everything else in the world.
To quote a wise child actor from a celebrated advertisement for taco kits: why not both?
Here’s how to do it: Half-T20. The exact same rules as a traditional T20 but with one crucial difference – after exchanging team sheets, we skip the toss and instead both captains bid on a target they believe they can chase. The team that bids higher gets to bat, while the underbidding captain defends the total.
Replacing the boring first innings of a T20 with a battle of wits between two captains going back and forth on potential targets accomplishes a number of goals.
Firstly, we reclaim extra time for sponsors to exploit, always important in this commercially driven age. More importantly, we can make the auction process an event in itself. Who wouldn’t love to see the crowd cheer as Aaron Finch performed an elaborate “No Deal” gesture to an opposing captain’s bid?
Kids, meanwhile, could be kept entertained by special guest celebrities (for example, a bucketheaded Bachelorette or one of the Hemsworths dressed as another packet of chips) offering their opinions on whether the captains should bid higher. Or maybe the celebrities could just have green slime dropped on them. The point is that with the elimination of an entire innings, you’d have plenty of time to explore all entertainment options and find what appeals most to the casual cricket fan.
In addition, the entire auction process would offer fresh new mathematical areas for the boffins to analyse. Bluffing, double-bluffing, brinksmanship, mumbling your bid. So many game theory areas to explore. Then after that, you get the run chase, with all the traditional
T20 cricket and associated CricViz numbercrunching anybody could ever ask for.
As the celebrated philosopher and Avengers villain Thanos the Mad Titan has taught us, sometimes less is more. The key to the future of T20 lies in getting rid of half of it.