Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  In Test cricket, the bowlers were charged with attacking – in order to take wickets – while batsmen traditionally emphasised defence, to stay in for as long as possible while they steadily accumulated runs. The framework of T20 cricket inverted this relationship – suddenly batsmen were the offence as they looked to score as many runs as fast as possible and bowlers the defence as they looked to prevent batsmen from doing so.

  This was a paradigm shift. T20 was not merely a shorter version of one-day cricket; the difference was altogether more profound, necessitating a wholly different approach to playing.

  The format’s incipient years were defined by an underlying tactical anarchy. ‘Nobody knows anything,’ the screenwriter William Goldman once said of the entertainment industry. So it was in the first skirmishes of T20.

  Worcestershire began the first summer by virtually inverting their batting order, aiming to use their bowlers’ big hitting to exploit the fielding restrictions in the first six overs. They even signed a big-hitting club player, David Taylor, on a specialist T20 contract, a harbinger of how T20 would encourage specialisation. Yet such attempts to innovate looked more like over-complication; Taylor harrumphed 46 on his debut, but averaged 11.71 in seven county T20 matches. The promoted bowlers, meanwhile, set about proving that uncultured hoicking was no way to score runs in T20. On the second day of professional T20, Matt Mason, a hulking Australian fast bowler, was sent in to bat at four, imbued with intent to clear the ropes. Every ball he swung, with ever more ferocity. Every ball he missed, until he was caught for nought off ten balls; Worcestershire’s specialist batsmen were left with insufficient time and the team stumbled to 122 all out. It was a salutary lesson in the pitfalls of wrong-headed strategy in T20.

  Yet even in the bedlam of T20’s first years, there were glimpses of sides succeeding through recognising what could be achieved by taking the game a little more seriously. John Inverarity, the coach of Warwickshire, used to bellow ‘two’ to his players, reflecting a belief that the side who scored the most twos would win. His side reached the final in 2003. Derbyshire, convinced that the six Powerplay overs – with only two fielders permitted outside the 30-yard circle – were pivotal and that batsmen were more dangerous if they could line up a particular bowler, used six different bowlers across the six overs.

  Leicestershire were the first to succeed through embracing how, for all that T20 is seen as the most instinctive, spontaneous format of the game, it also lends itself best to planning. They overcame the limitations of a small playing squad and budget to triumph in the Twenty20 Cup in 2004 and 2006, giving a glimpse of what was possible.

  ‘No one had really decided how to play it. They basically just thought it was “slog it as far as you can and that’s it”, and that spinners wouldn’t even be a factor in the game,’ recalled fast bowler Charles Dagnall. Leicestershire took a different approach. ‘We weren’t great in other competitions, and we thought we’ve got a chance here.’

  ‘We were ahead of our time as far as planning and game management,’ remembered the wicketkeeper Paul Nixon. ‘Having the right opportunities at the right times, reading pitches, knowing the right times for hitters, the right times to be able to box clever, and save hitters for the end, to get a new batsman in, not losing two wickets together, change of orders, having certain batsmen that can target spin – certain things that you can really latch on to that you can take on most pitches.’

  Leicestershire managed the pace of the game intelligently, slowing things down when they were batting to help them think and speeding things up when they were bowling, to rush the opposition batsmen.

  At a time when many teams experimented opening with pinch-hitters – weaker batsmen with a penchant for scoring quickly – their batting followed a simple mantra. Leicestershire put their best batsman, Brad Hodge, at the top of the order so he could face the most balls. They planned where they wanted to be after the end of the six-over Powerplay and mapped out the progression of their innings. They emphasised having partnerships between a hitter and a player who would rotate the strike. They believed this combination meant they avoided a build-up of dot balls if two hitters struggled to get going or avoided falling behind the required rate if they had two strike rotators at the crease. The top eight batsmen were always padded up and ready to go, enabling Leicester to have a flexible batting order. They would send in players to target certain bowling types; the earliest intimation of a team playing to match-ups, well before the advent of data analysis elevated it to become a major part of the game.

  With the ball, Leicestershire attacked early on, even if it meant leaking boundaries, believing that ultimately the best way to contain a T20 innings was to take regular wickets. They played with two frontline spinners – Claude Henderson and Jeremy Snape – with Hodge offering an extra spin option, and extended the boundaries at Grace Road to make the spinners harder to hit; sometimes, Hodge would even open the bowling with his off spin. They put mandatory men in the 30-yard circle to save one, rather than leaving them on the edge of the circle, reasoning that they could not afford to let the opposition score off every ball of the innings. They used Dagnall’s inswing in the middle overs, believing that it was harder for batsmen to free their arms than against outswingers.

  And they innovated. At T20 practice sessions, bowlers experimented audaciously – running in, stopping again, and then restarting; bowling with no front arm; looking away as they ran in – to try to put batsmen off. Bowlers were encouraged to master not just one slower ball, but several. Tweaks were made to the field before a bowler delivered a slower ball.

  Now, none of these steps look revolutionary or, perhaps, anything more than an implementation of the obvious. But low-budget Leicestershire’s triumphs were a hint of what it was possible to achieve by embracing T20 not simply as an abridged version of limited overs cricket, but an entirely different sport.

  ‘Everyone knew their specific roles and despite looking like a pretty unfashionable team we had some players that were sort of humble enough to play for the team and play the role,’ recalled Snape. ‘We were in the first four finals and in such a volatile tournament to be in four finals and win two of them is a pretty good effort. So that’s not a fluke. That’s not chaos, that’s a strategy and we knew how to manage risk.’

  ***

  The nature of T20’s inception, as a marketing tool as much as a serious sporting contest, and the complexities of the game itself, informed the early coverage of it. Lots was said about T20’s impact on the sport; very little was said about the game itself, and coverage was almost infantilised. ‘Very few writers have tried to get under the bonnet of T20,’ the former England captain Michael Atherton noted in The Times in 2016. ‘What T20 means for cricket as a sport has been the prevailing narrative, while there has been precious little writing about the game itself.’

  Traditional forms of cricket, played over days rather than hours, more obviously lent themselves to considered analysis. And so an image was created that T20 – while popular and fun – was somehow lacking in sporting integrity. Such was the inherent snobbery and conservatism of those within the sport that T20 was treated with little more than casual disregard. That much was embodied by the way in which the T20 World Cup was created.

  For the International Cricket Council (ICC), a T20 world championship held obvious appeal. They were about to go out to tender on commercial rights for 2007 to 2015 and believed that a T20 World Cup would add significant value. And the ICC feared that, if they did not take ownership of a world championship, somebody else would try to, raising the spectre of a schism in cricket, like that caused by the Australian mogul Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the 1970s when he lured players away from the international game with comparably vast sums of money. ‘There were entrepreneurs, broadcasters, sponsors and multinational businesses that would seek to claim the right to run the international version of T20 if the ICC did not stake its claim and actually hold the first event,’ ICC chief executiv
e Malcolm Speed wrote in Sticky Wicket: A Decade of Change in World Cricket.

  Before an ICC board meeting in March 2006, Speed prepared a paper arguing that there was ‘first-mover advantage’ for the ICC in organising an international T20 tournament before anyone else. But, just like the ECB had found four years earlier, other administrators were not natural supporters of the concept.

  Two countries stood out in their opposition: India and Pakistan, the two nations with the most cricket fans. The Pakistan Cricket Board’s chairman Shahryar Khan said that he had never been to a T20 match and never would; awkward, then, when a PowerPoint presentation later showed him presenting the trophy at the final of Pakistan’s domestic tournament.

  Most problematic of all was India’s stance. ‘T20? Why not ten-ten or five-five or one-one?’ So Niranjan Shah, the honorary secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), thundered, endlessly repeating one mantra: ‘India will never play T20.’ Eventually India and Pakistan agreed to the creation of the World T20 (WT20) from 2007, but only on the condition that participation in 2007 was not obligatory. The ICC’s decision to initially call the tournament the World T20 – rather than the T20 World Cup, as they would later brand it – reflected a certain uncertainty about how the tournament would go. In the ICC commercial rights contracts for the 2007 to 2015 period, there was only a stipulation of one WT20 every four years. A second planned edition of the tournament each four-year cycle was marked as either a WT20 or a Champions Trophy (a 50-over ODI tournament billed as a mini World Cup), leaving the ICC scope to row back from the WT20 if it was not successful.

  India and Pakistan only made it to South Africa, for the inaugural event, because of shrewd politicking from Speed and Ehsan Mani, the ICC president. While discussions about the tournament’s creation were taking place, the ICC was inviting countries to make submissions for hosting the 2011 and 2015 ICC World Cups. The bid submitted by the four Asian Test nations – Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – did not comply with ICC requirements, but there were no alternatives; Speed and Mani persuaded England to bid too, to give the ICC more clout.

  Initially, the ICC rejected the Asian bid on account of it being non-compliant. The Asian nations were shocked. At a subsequent private meeting, Mani offered to allow Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to submit another bid if they all agreed to participate in the inaugural WT20. The BCCI reluctantly agreed.

  Preparation for the tournament was scarcely less slapdash than before Hollioake chose to bowl on T20’s first night. The ICC didn’t even bother to organise a qualifying tournament, instead inviting non-Test nations based on their ODI performances. Only a two-week window could be found to squeeze in the tournament. But there was a happy by-product of this bedlam, making the tournament feel breezy and fun, and an antidote to the bloated, torturously long and over-corporatised 50-over World Cup in the West Indies earlier that year.

  Unlike that event, teams did not prioritise the T20 World Cup. England and India did not even bother to organise any warm-up matches, because their own series in England did not finish in time. That was not the only indication of India’s disinterest. Legendary players Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble, V.V.S. Laxman and Rahul Dravid were all left out of the squad. No one was quite sure who to choose in their place; India’s first domestic T20 tournament only began in April 2007, later than any other Test nation, and the BCCI’s lack of regard for it was such that matches were not even televised. India were the last Test nation to play a T20 international, and had only played one before the WT20.

  Yet the two teams who did not want to contest the tournament – two teams preoccupied with one-day internationals, but who had both crashed out of that year’s 50-over World Cup at the first stage – would end up being the best two. This quirk of fate would have extraordinary consequences for the sport.

  Pakistan sent a full-strength team to South Africa and, given the presence of Shahid Afridi, a prototype T20 cricketer before anyone had created the format, their success was not overly surprising. More unexpected – and transformative – was India’s performance.

  At 26, Mahendra Singh Dhoni was appointed captain, the first time he had ever led India in any format, embodying the sense that the nation was treating the WT20 as little more than glorified exhibition matches.

  Two rousing weeks ensued. India won a bowl-out – T20’s version of a penalty shootout – with Pakistan. Yuvraj Singh thrashed six sixes in an over off Stuart Broad. An epic semi-final, still one of the finest games in T20 history, was played out against Australia. And on 24 September 2007, Dhoni entrusted the medium-pacer Joginder Sharma to defend 13 from the last over of the final against Pakistan.

  Sharma’s first delivery betrayed the tension in Johannesburg. It was hurled so far away wide of the off stump that it ended up off the pitch altogether. Pakistan’s fans responded to the umpire’s signal with an outcry of delight.

  Now Dhoni ran to calm down his bowler. Sharma responded with a delivery that swung away outside off stump. Misbah-ul-Haq could only swing and miss. Now, Indian supporters were rapt.

  Not for long. The next delivery was an egregious full toss. Misbah, already striding down the wicket, harrumphed it straight down the ground for six.

  A repeat would clinch the first World T20 for Pakistan. Dhoni lost his impenetrable demeanour, furrowing his brow as he returned from talking to Sharma. Perhaps he regretted asking him, and not the more experienced Harbhajan Singh, to bowl the final over.

  The next ball, once again, was well outside off stump. There was no reason for Misbah to digress from what had worked so well the previous delivery. Instead, he shuffled across his crease and attempted to scoop the ball over fine leg, a shot he had played with distinction throughout the tournament.

  Yet Sharma was too slow to play the shot against; there was not enough pace on the ball. So, rather than hurtle towards the fine leg boundary, the ball remained marooned in the air. Sreesanth grasped the catch with a nonchalance that defied the pressure of the moment. Misbah slouched to his knees in despair, unable to rag himself away from the ground; India’s entire support staff ran on to the field in their joy, and the players were soon embraced by Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan. In a format India did not care for a fortnight earlier, Indian tricolours were now ubiquitous in the crowd and far beyond.

  Sharma would never play international cricket again. He would become Deputy Superintendent of Police in Haryana. But he helped usher in a revolution that transformed the sport forever.

  ***

  In most major international sports, the game’s beating heart – the source of most matches and cash – has long been at club level. Before T20, cricket was the major exception. Since the first Ashes Test match between England and Australia in 1877, cricket’s pinnacle has been at international level. Club matches were widely viewed as subsidiary to the international game; more a tool to produce international players than a rival attraction to marquee nation against nation fixtures. Before T20 was created, only around 10% of the sport’s total wealth came from club matches. In football, about 80% of the sport’s wealth came from club games.

  The difference reflected cricket’s roots and individual development. Yet it also amounted to an enormous missed opportunity. Anyone who could turn domestic cricket from an addendum to the international game to the main event could bring a huge influx of cash to the sport.

  Lalit Modi, an Indian businessman who had made millions selling cigarettes, and a cricketing fanatic, had a plan. He believed that cricket did not need to be dominated by international matches alone. After spending much of his youth in America he sensed that India was ripe for an American-style sports league too – with privately owned domestic teams and the competition featuring the best players, both from India and overseas. So he proposed an inter-city cricket league, to be played over four to six weeks each year, under floodlights at the country’s best cricket grounds. Like an Indian soap opera, the league would draw in fans to return
night after night.

  The plan failed. The BCCI, perhaps loath to give up control to individual franchises, did not agree to Modi’s idea for a 50-over franchise competition. That was in 1996. Twelve years later, everything was different.

  It would be easy to say that the BCCI’s new embrace of domestic franchise cricket, in the T20 format, owed to their vision, awareness of dwindling attention spans and sense of cricket’s shifting sands. Certainly, it owed something to all of these. But, more than anything else, the IPL, the glitziest club competition that the sport had ever known, was born out of fear.

  On 3 April 2007, Subhash Chandra, an Indian billionaire who pioneered cable television in India in the 1990s, announced the creation of the Indian Cricket League (ICL). Zee TV, the cable network Chandra founded, had been outbid for rights to broadcast Indian internationals. So Chandra hatched a plan: he would organise his own private league to provide content for Zee TV to broadcast. That way, he would never need to worry about being outbid for rights ever again.

  The ICL would be a T20 tournament, owned by Zee, consisting of six city-based teams. Zee’s ICL board comprised former international players including Kapil Dev, one of the enduring icons of Indian cricket. Dev’s home town, Chandigarh, provided the tournament with a stadium. When the tournament was officially launched, in August 2007, it revealed that it had signed leading Pakistan players Inzamam-ul-Haq and Mohammad Yousuf, West Indies great Brian Lara and a number of other internationals from India and the rest of the world.