On the front foot: Duck it or chuck it?

Why did T20 cricket go crazy after it struck the Indian coast? One of the reasons is that India is essentially a one-sport country

Advertisement

The problem of good and bad exists in all times. Even in sport. The emergence and domination of the Twenty20 format in cricket has only sharpened the debate over good and bad in cricket.

Is Twenty20 cricket good or bad for the sport?

Another way of framing this question is this: Is something that puts more and more food on the table – or another Ferrari in the garage, if you are Sachin Tendulkar – good or bad? Thus asked, the question can have only one answer: Yes, of course!

T20 cricket was invented purely for the sake of money – county cricket was losing its audience, and T20 cricket was introduced as a three-hour after-office entertainment package. This is probably the only format of a major sport that was invented only to rake in cash. Money is, as we all know, a great persuader.

Take Tendulkar’s T20 career: The great batsman played only one T20 match for India, back in December 2006. That was India’s first-ever T20 match, in South Africa. Tendulkar then opted out of the T20 World Cup in 2007 because, obviously, he didn’t think very highly of this format, and because he believed that T20 was a format for the young players.

Tendulkar then went on to play 96 T20 matches for Mumbai Indians. He was 40 years and seven months old when he last played for Mumbai Indians.

What changed Tendulkar’s mind after 2007? It’s got to be the money that he was making by playing for Mumbai Indians. This is no insult to Tendulkar – as a professional cricketer, of course he played for money; and of course, he also played with his heart full of pride and passion for India when he represented the country. But when push came to shove, Tendulkar put money over country: In 2011, he preferred to play for Reliance Industries rather than India – he played in the IPL but opted to rest during India’s tour of West Indies that year. Money is a very, very useful thing, and it would be unfair to criticise Tendulkar for putting money above country; aren’t engineers and doctors who sell their services to the highest bidder abroad doing the same thing?

What’s good?

T20 cricket is the biggest challenge to what is objectively “good” in cricket. The challenges to what’s considered “good cricket” have been coming up for well over a century. Batting, for instance, was once only an off-side art – it was once considered unethical to hit the ball to the leg-side! In the words of the great CB Fry, the batsman was expected to “drive on the off side like a gentleman”.

It was once considered unethical – before the advent of excellent safety gear – to bowl bouncers at the tail-enders.

It was considered bad – nay, horrible and irresponsible – batting if you were dismissing hitting the ball in the air. Not going too far back, in 1984, Indian captain Sunil Gavaskar got Kapil Dev dropped from the team after they had lost the Delhi Test against England. Kapil had already hit one six in five balls and was out trying to hit a second six off the sixth ball he faced.

Gavaskar’s anger surged because India lost that match. Also, he and most other batsmen of that era had been brought up on a very strict regimen of hitting the ball only along the ground. Even in practice, if he or other batsmen hit the ball in the air, they were punished by the coaches – they had to run circles around the field in the blazing sun, in full cricket gear, sometimes holding the bat aloft.

Cricket in that era had a high level of intolerance towards shots hit in the air. It was more tolerable for the burly fast bowler or lower-order allrounder to come out and start hitting the ball high and far.

But getting out after hitting the ball in the air when your team was in trouble was the cricketing equivalent of stabbing your best friend in the back with a rusty dagger. It was a sin.

Changing times

Chris Gayle smashed 100 of 47 balls against England in a World T20 match the other day. He hit 11 sixers that evening.

Sunil Gavaskar struck just 28 sixers in a lifetime of Test matches, from 1971 to 1987. Even Viv Richards, the great, fearsome demolisher from West Indies, hit only 84 sixers in 121 Test matches. Gayle has hit 98 sixes in 103 Tests, apart from 238 in 269 ODIs and 98 in 46 T20Is. His international sixer count is an amazing 434 from 418 games.

Don Bradman, the greatest batsman of all time, hit just six sixers in his whole Test career of 52 matches, which spanned nearly 20 years.

The number of sixers hit by top batsmen in Test cricket provides a fascinating insight about hitting the ball in the air. From the 1980s onward, when ODI cricket gained greater acceptance among cricketers and became a rage among the fans, more and more top-order batsmen started to attempt sixers.

In The Tao of Cricket, Ashis Nandy argued that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British”. It’s a complex book and a complex theory, but the upshot of this theory is this – the qualities and concept of cricket are quintessentially Indian. Patience, the notion of death (a batsman getting out) and reincarnation (getting another chance in the second innings) are associated closely with the Eastern belief and value system. Patient batsmen, possessing excellent temperament and technique, earned the greatest respect of the connoisseurs in Indian cricket.

India had excellent stroke-players right from the 1920s through to the 1980s – men like CK Nayudu, Mushtaq Ali, MAK Pataudi, Salim Durrani, Dilip Vengsarkar, to name a few. But our greatest batsmen were patient accumulators who could bat for days – players such as Vijay Merchant, Vijay Hazare, Vijay Manjrekar, Sunil Gavaskar. Tendulkar broke away from the road taken and paved by India’s greatest batsmen – he was an attacking batsman who, nevertheless, did have a great defensive technique. His genius and aggression overshadowed the more classically correct Rahul Dravid, who was the more patient and steady of the two.

An Indian game?

T20 cricket could also be said to be “an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British”. Indeed, this assertion is even demonstrable – T20 cricket was launched in 2003 in England and South Africa, and in 2006 in Australia. But it was its advent in India that took it to a whole different level of popularity and financial success, first with the unauthorised Indian Cricket League (ICL) in 2007 and then with the Indian Premier League in 2008 and later. As the popularity of the IPL grew, Australia and England launched refurbished, glamorised versions of their T20 leagues. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, West Indies and Pakistan joined the race.

Why did T20 cricket go crazy after it struck the Indian coast? The reasons are simple – England, Australia and South Africa have a huge pool of sports and cricket is just one of them. India, on the other hand, is essentially a one-sport country with a much, much bigger TV and live audience than these countries. You don’t even need to market and hardsell cricket in India.

Initial resistance

But India was resistant to T20 cricket at start. In 2006, when a proposal came up at the ICC to launch the T20 World Cup, India opposed it. Sharad Pawar, the BCCI president, said then: “We share Pakistan's stance on this. India also does not support a Twenty20 world tournament. We feel it dilutes the importance of international cricket.”

He was absolutely right – T20 cricket, especially in its city-based franchise avatar, does dilute the importance of international cricket. Gayle is one example – he has in the past opted to play in the IPL but not for West Indies. Tendulkar is another example – he chose to play IPL in 2011 but opted to “rest” during the subsequent Test tour of West Indies.

Kevin Pietersen’s love for T20 cricket (and the money it earned him) was a big reason behind his falling out with the English cricket authorities. “I love playing in India. I cherish the friendships, the atmosphere, the colour and the drama of IPL cricket. I love the ambition of the whole thing,” Pietersen wrote in his autobiography. Then he added the clincher: “I don’t think there’s anyone on this earth who would turn down the opportunity to earn that sort of money in the space of six weeks.”

Andrew Flintoff rejected an England contract in favour of a freelance career. A survey in Australia showed that 67% of that country’s players can foresee players turning down a Cricket Australia contract to become a freelancer in T20 cricket. So yes, T20 cricket does pose a great challenge to all the national teams.

But you really don’t think that Pawar was worried about the “importance of international cricket”, do you? The fact was that the BCCI wasn’t keen about a three-hour game because fewer advertisements could be shown to TV audiences during it than, say, during an eight-hour One-day International match.

India’s attitude changed in 2007 when they won the inaugural T20 World Cup. The BCCI copied the ICL’s city-team model and sold the eight franchises to private entities, making much more money than could be made from TV revenues. In converting the BCCI to the T20 belief system, there was one great persuader – money.

New audience

Over the years, T20 cricket has grown exponentially. In India, a country of couch potatoes where evening entertainment means watching TV, T20 cricket in the evenings had a ready audience. The sight of the ball soaring high over the rope, or into the stand, sends even grown-up men and women into a strange, childlike outburst of glee.

T20 cricket has created a new segment of cricket-watchers, on TV and at the ground; essentially, cricket fandom had been a male preserve, but T20 cricket has made it more of a family affair. T20 cricket presents an excellent alternative to an evening out for a movie, or to the retrograde soap operas on TV.

IPL and Australia’s Big Bash League are now among the most popular sports leagues in the world. This surge in the popularity of T20 cricket, across the world, makes it very difficult for the analysts (all highly-paid TV commentators) to speak facts about T20 cricket.

Emperor’s clothes

Privately, and sometimes even publicly, cricketers declare that T20 cricket is just a fun format and must not be taken too seriously. They say this over and over again. But how can a format that’s flush with such serious money be dismissed as a “frivolous format”?

In 2007, after the first T20 World Cup, the ICC put a restriction on the number of T20Is a team could play in a year. “It obviously feels great to be part of the winning team in the Twenty20 format,” Yuvraj Singh said in October 2007, adding: “But it's more of an entertainment for the crowd and the batsmen.”

Yuvraj was, basically, saying that T20 cricket is a format just for fun; that it’s the least challenging of the sport’s three formats. That’s what cricketers know and believe.

In 2008, after the first IPL, South Africa fast bowler Dale Steyn spoke the truth about T20s and IPL. He said that competing in the IPL was like “a paid holiday”. “The IPL was only four overs a game and it was like a paid holiday; you only had to work hard if you felt like it,” he said.

Speaking the truth about the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ is nothing but stupid. Steyn had to apologise promptly: “I was trying to be funny and just ended up being stupid — I was an idiot.” Exactly — if you’re being paid a million dollars for few weeks’ work of T20, you’d better stick to a script of eulogy and not speak the truth about the frivolous nature of the format.

The new fans of the sport, whose knowledge of cricket is restricted to T20 cricket, don’t realise that this format is a game of chance. In this format, a Paul Valthaty or Swapnil Asnodkar can outshine Tendulkar on a given day; Rohit Sharma and Yuvraj Singh can take hat-tricks. Almost any team can win a game on a given day, and most teams in the field can win a given tournament. That’s why all five World T20s have been won by different teams; there have been so many different victorious teams in the domestic leagues of all countries (see tables).

At different times, different players tried to restrain the fans’ enthusiasm about T20 cricket — they’ve emphasised that it’s the format of the amateur; for the cricketers themselves, the toughest and most challenging format is Test cricket.

But then, for the new fan, Test cricket is boring, right?

rohit.mahajan@gmail.com