Cricket should getdown on its knees and give thanks for T20
India’s vibrant crowds at the World Cup shame our sniffiness at the short form
In Mumbai, I saw more kids playing cricket than I have ever seen anywhere
THE bright heat of the day had gone and a light breeze was drifting off Back Bay, cooling the young people sitting on the sea wall on Marine Drive. Knots of friends posed for group selfies, crabs scuttled around on the rocks below and a man walking his yapping dog let it chase some kids just long enough to make them scream and run before he reined it back in with its lead.
That counts for peace and quiet in Mumbai on a Saturday night. But on the opposite side of the road, there was pandemonium. India were playing a World T20 warm-up match against South Africa at the Wankhede Stadium a few hundred yards away, the game had just begun and the excitement was unconfined.
Fans with tickets were still barging their way through the large crowds that had gathered behind a police cordon and dashing down D Road towards the ground. When the spectators made it through one last police check at the foot of the staircase leading up to the stand, they rushed up the steps and stared around at the scene that greeted them in wonder.
Most of them wore stupid grins on their faces as they stared out at their heroes in the field. Some of them punched the air in jubilation just to be there and slapped each other on the back. Just for the sake of reiteration: this was a warm-up game. And yet the stadium was full and it was rocking. It was probably the best atmosphere I have ever witnessed at a cricket ground.
I hadn’t seen that kind of joyous pandemonium at a sporting event for some time. In fact, I’d almost forgotten what it looked like. A father and son sitting in front of me lived every ball. They groaned when there was an Indian misfield, they hugged each other whenever a South Africa batsman was dismissed. Everywhere, there was an innocent delight about the game that has disappeared from much of the sport we watch in Europe now.
This was Twenty20 that was doing this, too. I have seen Test cricket in India. I have seen Sachin Tendulkar score a century in Chennai and witnessed the outpouring of emotion that caused. But India has embraced the evolution of the game as it has reached its most truncated form and it has taken this country’s love of cricket to new levels.
I know cricket in India is not nirvana. Corruption is rife, the BCCI are notorious for their self-interest and ticket prices often put games out of the reach of fans. Perhaps
IT IS never a good sign for a sport when the first action of a new season ends with the teams apologising to the spectators because the quality of entertainment was so poor. I listened to the first qualifying session of the new Formula One season in Australia on the radio and felt sorry for the commentators. However much the BBC paid to broadcast F1, it was too much. part of the thing that made that warm-up game so special was that many tickets had been given away free to help fill the stadium.
But I was at the Wankhede Stadium again on Wednesday night when Chris Gayle produced an innings of quite breathtaking power to sweep the West Indies past England. OK, it was not a capacity crowd but it was still a good attend
ance considering the host nation were not playing. And once again, the fans were consumed by the spectacle. Who wouldn’t be? It was astonishing stuff. Nobody there will forget Gayle’s wondrous innings in a hurry.
The same goes for the lucky spectators who watched the astonishing match between South Africa and England in Mumbai on Friday evening. England scored 44 off the first two overs of their innings and some of their strokes (Joe Root’s reverse ramp shot, anybody?), as they chased down their opponents’ total of 229, were quite stunning in their conception, their innovation and their execution.
I was back i n England by then. I missed part of the South Africa game because I was at a school concert. At the end of it, the headmaster got on the stage and, after saying his thank yous, announced that England had hit the winning runs in the Twenty20 some time during the middle of Pomp and Circumstance. The boys on the stage cheered and clapped.
It has got to the point now, surely, where our slight sniffiness in this country about the shortest format of the game can no longer be justified. It has got to the point, actually, where our lingering reserve about it makes us look outmoded and dull.
Times change. Sport changes and evolves. Or else it dies. And rather than bemoaning the vulgarity of Twenty20, we should be down on our knees giving thanks for it. Just when the game seemed to be sinking into decline, T20 has breathed new life into it. Twenty20 has made cricket seem current and vibrant again. It has made it feel modern. And relevant. Even progressive. I’ve sat through plenty of three- and four-day county games at Lord’s and Old Trafford surrounded by a few hundred spectators. They had their appeal, certainly, but you felt you were watching a sport that was dying. At Twenty20, when it is done with verve and pizazz, as it is in India and at Australia’s Big Bash, cricket feels alive again.
ITS emergence does not need to signal the end of Test cricket. Far from it. The opposite is true. It can help to revitalise Test cricket. There is still plenty of interest in the five-day game. Most still recognise it as the purest form of the game. And Twenty20 can carry it along on a tide of new populism. If the waning of interest in the game in general is arrested, there is plenty of room for both formats.
From strictly limited experience, that seems to be the case i n Mumbai. Last Sunday, I wandered down Madame Cama Road in the south of the city and saw more kids playing cricket than I have ever seen anywhere. One group played down a sidestreet. The fact that long-on was stationed on the central reservation of a four-lane highway seemed no impediment to them whatsoever.
A little further on, on the Oval Maidan, there were maybe 50 games of cricket taking place in a joyous, chaotic celebration of the sport. Balls flew hither and thither, outfields overlapped, fielders chased wildly through crowds of spectators. It was glorious mayhem.
Most of all, it felt uplifting to see the game’s popularity. In England, we have started to become defeatist about cricket’s decline. The World T20, its feats of individual brilliance, its jaw-dropping stroke-play and its marvelling crowds are proving quite an antidote.