Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  But something else happened. ‘Where Talent Meets Opportunity’, the IPL said about itself and that is exactly what started happening. Where the opportunity to play at an exalted level was confined to 20 players, now 75 or 80 could. If you had a skill you were noticed, sometimes for a hundred thousand dollars, sometimes for half a million, sometimes, unbelievably, for a million. Beautiful stories of players lifting their families out of poverty emerged. The IPL changed people’s lives. Test cricket could never have done that.

  It has had side effects. Not everyone wants to bat for a day in tough conditions when they can earn enough by biffing the ball for 20 minutes. Playing for the country is a dream but playing for a high-profile franchise is not a bad alternative. The lure of riches has parents going to coaches and asking that their children be made good enough to play in the IPL. Coaches aren’t quite sure whether to tell their wards to take their front foot to the pitch of the ball or away from it to open up the body to more hitting zones.

  Other players are teammates one day and rivals the next; strengths are circulated, weaknesses analysed. Conversations, and analytics, mean there are no secrets any more. And in a world where a corporate executive is your boss, your post-tournament appraisal might lead to the sack. Insecurity has taken a step closer. Dare I say it, franchise cricket is more football than Test cricket.

  Will it survive? Will people find one game is like another, will monotony creep in? Will the lure of the extra buck in a shortened game draw all kinds into its fold? As ownership gets fuzzier, who controls the sanctity of our game? Who are its parents? I am not worried about the first – tennis and football have survived and thrived – but I am very concerned by the second. Not all that we hear is noble, not all countries have laws to deal with malpractices.

  T20 cricket, at the moment, is similar to what we see as soon as the lights turn green in India. Everyone wants to move ahead immediately, there is honking and jostling for territory but amidst the turbulence, everyone seems to find space. Within a couple of hundred metres, laminar flow is re-established. T20 cricket seeks that laminar flow. It needs regulation, it needs vigilance.

  But it is a fascinating sport, it will keep cricket alive and having drawn people into its fold, will introduce them to the many joys of Test cricket too. T20 is a proud young adult and if we nurture it, it will carry its ageing parents further.

  It is entirely appropriate that two young men tell this story. Both have grown up hearing of the mysteries of Test cricket but they are not bound by it and that allows them to explore T20 cricket with an open mind. Tim and Freddie are the torchbearers of tomorrow, we must listen to them.

  FOREWORD

  BY MICHAEL VAUGHAN

  In the early years of T20 many thought, ‘Wow this is amazing for the game – but it’ll just be a flash in the pan.’ But I could clearly see that it was going to be a long-term success. When you’ve got India – with their passion for the game and the billions who follow it there – and the kind of people that were getting involved in the franchises, it was only ever going to continue on an upward trajectory. It seemed obvious to me that if anyone had ever played cricket, it was likely that they played a T20 game and they would therefore be able to readily relate to this project.

  On the flip side, I could never understand why those in England, in particular, were reluctant to back a game we had created. I couldn’t understand why we weren’t open to giving England players the opportunity to play in the IPL.

  Only the best will survive on the T20 circuit. It’s very difficult to come back from disappointing at a franchise. If you fail at one, you almost lose the trust of all the franchises. Particularly in the IPL. If you have one bad year you just get lobbed on the scrapheap.

  When it first came to the fore, T20 was seen as a crash-bang-wallop format where players didn’t really have to think. People said it was basically baseball in 20 overs and that only sloggers would flourish. I think it’s been proven over the years that you need a lot of nous. You need a lot of skill. You need a really strong cricket brain because you are under the ultimate pressure. Test match cricket is the ultimate test but if you find yourself in trouble, you often get a period of time to work your way out of the problem. In T20, if you find yourself in trouble, you’re out, you’re gone.

  T20 has brought pressure and exposure to players. The levels and the standard has risen because all players now know they have a great opportunity to earn a lot of money.

  If I was playing now I’d go and make sure that I was a 360-degree player. So I’d need the ramps, the tricks, the reverse sweeps, the reverse ramps, I’d learn to manoeuvre my feet more at different times to the different bowlers. Create different angles. But you can still be very effective and have a strike rate of 130-plus by being a classical player. Not everyone can hit the ball like Andre Russell. Not everyone has the power and muscles that he has, but there are ways and means of making yourself into a really good 360-degree player who can time the ball, finesse and manoeuvre it into gaps and I think that’s what the best-quality players do. You wouldn’t say that Virat Kohli is a power hitter, but he times the ball so well he can hit it over the boundary. That’s the style of player I would try to be.

  I think the old-fashioned player and fan would say the T20 stars are just sloggers but actually in order to hit it hard you have to have amazing technique. You have to have a great base to play those shots. Your head position has to be strong. You have to be still on the release of the ball. That’s a technical side of the game that doesn’t get spoken about enough – and T20 players have incredible techniques.

  These players work very, very hard and they get rewards for it but I think – and where T20 is clever – you need different styles of player in different positions throughout the different overs. It’s the skill of the captain and the coaches to provide their team with these options in order to be successful.

  Anyone who looks down on T20 should try it themselves. You try to hit a ball miles out of the ground on a regular basis with such clean, consistent striking as these players do. Go into a field and get someone to throw you balls and try to do it – it’s nigh-on impossible, yet these guys make it look so easy and do it on such a consistent basis. I think that’s the biggest compliment I can give: players of this era that can strike the ball out of the ground make it look so easy. Like a golfer hitting a drive 330 yards, a cover drive played beautifully by a quality player makes it look easy. It’s not. And like an elite golfer, they’ve worked incredibly hard to get there. They’ve trained their brain, they’ve trained their eye, they’ve trained their technique and they’ve trained their mindset to be able to deliver under pressure on a regular basis. Any skill at the highest level doesn’t just happen. These guys have put thousands of hours of effort and time and hard work into getting their skill levels up so they can produce those flamboyant strokes under the pressure of a quality game.

  You are always going to get the odd dinosaur who will say these big smashes to the boundary are down to the bats, that the boundaries are shorter and the bowling is not as good as in Test cricket. Well I disagree. The bowling in T20 is right up there. Sometimes you might see the bowlers flapping and flipping a little bit but that’s because the batsmen are putting them under so much pressure with the power and variation of their shots. I think we should be really promoting the fact that if a bowler’s numbers are up there, they must be among the best of all time because of the pressure they’re being put under by the power, variation and fitness of the batsmen. We don’t mention fitness enough. How fit these players are, how strong they are, is phenomenal. I guess it’s partly to do with the opportunities they’ve been given with training facilities, coaching, strength and conditioning, nutritional advice and so on, but we have to give them credit for the amount of work they put in off the field. It’s a remarkable level of dedication.

  T20 is here to stay and we should celebrate and cherish all the skills involved. As long as we are on this globe it’s a brand of cricket th
at we are going to be watching. And it is only going to get bigger.

  ACRONYMS

  ACU (Anti-Corruption Unit [of the International Cricket Council (ICC)])

  BBL (Big Bash League)

  BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India)

  BPL (Bangladesh Premier League)

  CSK (Chennai Super Kings)

  CPL (Caribbean Premier League)

  DRS (Decision Review System)

  ECB (England & Wales Cricket Board)

  FICA (Federation of International Cricketers Association)

  ICC (International Cricket Council)

  ICL (Indian Cricket League)

  IPL (Indian Premier League)

  KKR (Kolkata Knight Riders)

  MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club)

  NBA (National Basketball Association)

  ODI (One Day International)

  PSL (Pakistan Super League)

  RCB (Royal Challengers Bangalore)

  T20 (Twenty20)

  TKR (Trinbago Knight Riders)

  WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency)

  WICB (West Indies Cricket Board)

  WT20 (World T20)

  PROLOGUE

  THE GIMMICK

  ‘I think it’s difficult to play seriously’

  Australia captain Ricky Ponting, 2005

  On a sultry evening at The Oval cricket ground in London in June 2003, Surrey’s captain Adam Hollioake won the toss against Middlesex. ‘We’re going to bowl first,’ he announced, ‘because I haven’t got a clue what’s going to happen.’

  This was how professional T20 cricket began, in a spirit of ignorance, innocence and sheer bedlam. Professional sport fleetingly became a world of children playing a game for the first time. No room for tactical smarts here. Just figuring out the new rules – the threat of an incoming batsman being ‘timed out’ if they took more than 90 seconds to take guard at the crease, and the need to bowl all 20 overs within 75 minutes or be penalised six runs for every over unbowled – was challenging enough.

  ‘Like many, we took it as a bit of a joke to begin with,’ Hollioake later admitted. Alex Tudor, who played for Surrey at the time, recalled before the tournament, ‘I remember Keith Medlycott, our coach at the time, was saying, “Who wants to play?” I was very much a longer formats player, and obviously had ambitions of getting back into the Test team, so I couldn’t care less about it.’

  Surrey were the Twenty20 Cup’s first champions. This was largely a triumph for simply having the best players, though Hollioake immediately grasped that T20 was not merely a shorter version of one-day cricket so much as a drastically different game. Before the tournament, he addressed the side, saying, ‘Lads, we’re not going to worry too much about ones and twos, we’re just going to try and hit more sixes than the other team.’

  In this way, Hollioake stumbled on an essential truth about the nature of T20, and how it diverged from the longer formats. ‘We went in with the theory that basically a one run here and there in a T20 game isn’t a big deal but if you had a six it’s a big chunk. You hit a couple of sixes and that could be 10% of your total – that’s a big swing. We went in to bat with the mentality of hitting sixes.’

  In many ways the point of T20 was to make people forget they were watching cricket at all. In that first, heady summer of 2003, evenings at the cricket were about pitchside Jacuzzis, bouncy castles, cheerleaders, speed dating and copious alcohol, with the cricket itself incidental. This was very deliberate; the very point of T20 was to create a product that appealed to those who would never normally go to cricket.

  At the start of the new century, the English game seemed moribund: domestic attendances fell 17% in the five years to 2001. John Carr, director of cricket operations for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), gave Stuart Robertson, the marketing manager, £250,000 to undertake the biggest consumer survey in cricket history.

  ‘We specifically wanted to ask people who were non-cricket fans but we felt might be convertible why they weren’t attending – we spoke to young people, children, ethnic minorities, inner-city communities, women,’ Robertson recalled. ‘The key reason why people weren’t attending cricket was summed up in a word: inaccessible. The game was perceived as being socially inaccessible. Some people thought it was a posh sport and they had to go to county games in a suit and tie.’ Over the course of their research, the ECB found that one-third of the population, were ‘cricket tolerators’. They neither disliked the game nor attended matches.

  The research made clear what this demographic wanted: a condensed format of the game on midweek evenings or weekends, lasting no more than three hours. ‘The killer finding was we found 19 million people who were there for convincing,’ Robertson said. ‘The format that they were keen about and would come along to was the 20-over format.’

  The concept was not new – T20 was a staple of club cricket around the country – but it had never been played at professional level before. The ECB executives, in need of a cure for the ailing summer game, were ardently in favour. The trouble was, those with the votes – the county chairmen – were not.

  On the morning of 21 April 2002, English cricket was on the brink of rejecting T20. As the vote at Lord’s loomed, the ECB’s chairman Lord MacLaurin – whose cricketing instincts were always far more radical than might have been expected of a Conservative member of the House of Lords – decided to ‘flatter the fuck’ out of the county chairmen, as one observer recalled.

  Some were wooed, but it did not look like enough, as became apparent in the meeting of the county chairmen immediately prior to the vote. Minutes before the vote, Bill Midgley, the 60-year-old Durham chairman who had previously opposed T20, gave a speech likening the debate to the staunch opposition to the creation of one-day cricket 40 years earlier. It proved decisive: the vote of the counties and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was won 11-7, with the MCC abstaining. T20 cricket was born.

  For all the gimmicks, T20 looked just enough like cricket that it was still recognisable. Cricket remained an 11-a-side game, played with six-ball overs; a mooted ‘golden over’, in which the batting side would choose an over for runs to count double, was rejected as too manufactured. Earlier innovations – Cricket Max, an abbreviated form of the game, designed by the former New Zealand batsman Martin Crowe; and the Hong Kong Sixes, a five-overs-a-side game played by teams of six – had been a qualified success without taking off, and were considered to have deviated too much from the sport’s underlying norms.

  The first-ever delivery in a professional T20 match – between Hampshire and Sussex on 13 June 2003 – was a wide, from Sussex’s James Kirtley. Thereafter the first year of English domestic T20 was a resounding success. The notorious English rain stayed away: all 48 games in 2003 were played to a conclusion and the 20-over format produced an accelerated form of the game, with all the action of a 50-over match crammed into less than half the time. Over 18 exhilarating days, Robertson’s target of an average attendance of 5,000 was cleared; it would have been considerably higher than 5,300 had county grounds had greater capacity. No county chief executive would ever again question whether they should play T20. The Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, regarded as the sport’s bible, noted that the competition ‘struck the motherlode of public affection for cricket that runs just below the surface crust of apparent indifference’. The ECB had got very lucky, but they had also got a lot right.

  Even as the game’s popularity snowballed – South Africa immediately launched a domestic T20 competition of their own, to great acclaim, and a swathe of other countries, including Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand, soon followed, its fundamental image, as nothing more than frivolous fun, remained.

  When New Zealand hosted Australia in the inaugural T20 international in 2005, the match drew more resemblance to a charity fundraiser than elite-level sport. The New Zealand players dressed up in retro kits and outfits – batsman Hamish Marshall wore frizzy hair more at home in a 1970s disco, and Australian fast bowler Glenn McGrath
did an impersonation of Trevor Chappell’s notorious underarm delivery. The sport itself was a sideshow. Australian captain Ricky Ponting scored 98 not out in his side’s victory yet, after the game, regarded the whole spectacle as a gimmick. ‘I think it’s difficult to play seriously. If it does become an international game then I’m sure the novelty won’t be there all the time.’

  ***

  Because of its brevity, T20 completely transformed how risk was conceived in cricket. In longer formats, the number of balls available to a batting team compelled batsmen to manage risk, to ensure that the team were not bowled out prematurely. In T20 the number of balls available to a batting team (120) was under half that in 50-over cricket (300) – but they still possessed 11 batsmen. A team could lose a wicket every 12 balls and still bat out their full allocation of 20 overs. Even Chris Martin, the New Zealand bowler regarded as the worst Test batsman of the 21st century, was only dismissed every 11.82 balls in Test cricket. In T20, then, defence virtually ceased to matter.

  Defence had historically formed the bedrock of batting because the tactical and technical foundation of cricket was the first-class game – the oldest format to be played at professional level. That first-class cricket was played across multiple days placed an emphasis on wicket preservation to enable batsmen to bat for as long as possible and steadily accumulate as many runs as possible. Traditional cricket coaching has therefore always prescribed the foundation of a strong batting technique to be a solid defence.