Bring on more exciting T20 circuses, to help ensure the theatre of Test cricket survives
Mickey Arthur recently stepped off Pakistan’s tour of Australia for a night to attend a Perth Scorchers match in the Big Bash in his home town. There was a near-capacity crowd and he confessed to enjoying a “great spectacle” before suggesting T20 cricket should be limited to domestic tournaments and World Cups.
The evidence of the last seven days in SA suggests Cricket SA would be more likely to agree to a three-Test tour of Afghanistan than scrapping arbitrary T20 internationals at home. Despite every conventional measure of a fixture’s likely commercial success indicating the current three-match series against Sri Lanka would struggle to attract significant interest, the sold-out signs were up at Supersport Park three days before the first game and almost 21,000 packed into the Wanderers to watch Sunday’s low-scoring thriller. Newlands tomorrow is also a sell-out.
The series is “meaningless”, the opposition has been woeful and it was a Proteas B team devoid of every one of its biggest names. And yet the people came. If you were a local administrator or the CE, would you listen to cricket experts and purists advising against the issuing of these licences to print money?
Far from their randomness and lack of meaning counting against these games, perhaps that is exactly what makes them so appealing. Quite simply, it is the event which appeals, not just the fixture or the prospect of the result.
As much as non-World Cup T20s are a look into the future, they are also a glorious throwback in time to the days when the circus came to town.
Boswell Wilkie didn’t need a league to have context — it didn’t “mean” anything at all. It didn’t matter if Leo the lead Lion was missing just as long as there were other lions, elephants, tightrope walkers and clowns.
Ten-year-old Max complained that he wasn’t going to see “AB and Hash” but his family had, nonetheless, travelled from Klerksdorp for the game.
On the field, never has the use of the T20 format as a beginners guide to international cricket been more successful, with the fast-tracked Lungi Ngidi providing a shuddering insight into a playing depth most of us have no idea exists.
If the sliced drive for six with which Mangaliso Mosehle greeted his first international delivery did not bring a smile to your face, you are following the wrong sport.
None of which means we should allow market forces to follow their “natural”, shortterm course. People such as Max grow up wanting more than three hours of fireworks and loud music with their cricket, just as tastes in food and music become more refined. Cricket needs to make sure there is a still a theatre to attend once the circus has left town. Increasingly desperate pleas for the urgent introduction of a recognisable league or championship for Test and ODI cricket are not misguided. Both formats make demands on the time of their followers that are unprecedented in the entertainment business and, as “events”, they provide precious few firework moments compared to the circus.
The evidence of our own eyes this week is that T20 cricket will dominate the landscape for years, just as elephants do in the bush without intervention of plague or man. But by controlling the herd size and manoeuvring its movement, there will still be enough foliage to allow different, rarer and more delicate creatures to survive.
But frankly, we do put on a helluva show and if there were that much fun to be had once or even twice a week for a month, people would come.
It is also why there is justifiable confidence that a bigger, rejuvenated domestic T20 tournament will succeed here when launched in 2018, especially if the eight independently owned franchises are carefully conceived and attract a specifically targeted market.
It will certainly help, too, that many of the best players in the world, including our own, will be attracted by the independent money. Should that happen, the domestic game would, like Australia’s, be on a path to financial prosperity that will hopefully spread along the food chain to the real, more traditional forms of the game.