The T20 Festival is upon us — a home series against Sri Lanka followed by the Asia Cup in Bangladesh, followed by the World T20 in India and finally, the IPL. That is nearly 16 weeks of a packed calendar that will either tell us Test cricket is in its dying throes or that T20 has overreached itself and television viewers walking around goggle-eyed by the end of May might be suffering from the condition known as Six Addiction or Gayle Fatigue.
How many sixes can the average cricket watcher cheer before he recognises the repetitive nature of the strokeplay? T20 porn is no different from the other kind. There are just so many robot-like moves, and the law of diminishing marginal excitement operates. There is just so much excitement Danny Morrison and his friends in the stadiums and studios can generate with high-pitched superlatives.
For T20 to thrive it has to be an alternative to the established format. When T20 itself becomes the established format, it will go the way of revolutions which become indistinguishable from what they have replaced. Shorn of the subtlety and poetry of the longer game, T20 will have to seek newer gimmicks, more tricks to keep its television audience, and that can only be good news for Test cricket.
On May 29, when the final of the IPL is played, we might get a hint as to which way the wind is blowing.
All of this might sound excessively cynical, and I may be completely wrong. Perhaps there is an audience in India for continuous T20 cricket over four months. Perhaps there is enough variety in the format to keep the eyeballs glued to television sets. Mahendra Singh Dhoni might exhibit different ways of hitting the same bowlers to keep the interest alive.
Perhaps the World Cup will be the platform to discover layers in the T20 game that will give it just the right amount of complexity to challenge the bowlers and batsmen alike. In some ways, the format has come to a technical dead end, the heavy bats, quick turn of feet and short boundaries working against creativity and new ideas. When you can hit the likes of the modern greats like Dale Steyn out of the ground with minimum effort, why complicate matters by looking to extend your repertoire?
Fond wishPerhaps — and this is the fondest wish — the real innovation will come from the bowlers who have suffered the most in T20. Spinners have made themselves more relevant over the years, but the weapons of the fast bowler, the slower ball and the yorker are becoming less effective. The batsman’s game becomes more of a batsman’s game and even more of a batsman’s game as the format gets shorter and shorter.
Maybe it is time to have a set of rules specifically for T20 that is different from the laws of the game. Some possibilities: the batsmen may be leg before to deliveries pitched outside the leg stump. The benefit of the doubt goes to the bowler, or, the fielder, in a close run out or caught situation. Fielders may be allowed to take a legal catch on the boundary line, and the ball shall be deemed not to have crossed the line if it does not actually do so. That will eliminate the endless replays, and save time if nothing else.
T20 cricket may be at the crossroads, and the millions that the players make out of it might have helped camouflage the fact. Unlike Test cricket, and even one-day cricket, there is an otherness about T20 that may be partially due to the huge sums involved. It is not always inclusive. A Chris Gayle hitting sixes at the Chinnaswamy Stadium thrills the Bangalore crowds, but he is not a darling of the spectators in the old-fashioned sense. Club cricket has a long way to go before it can match club football in passion and involvement.
In Jaipur at the launch of Wisden India Almanack , football icon Baichung Bhutia made this point forcefully. He was amazed at the crowd reaction at an IPL game he attended, he said. After a while, many stopped cheering even the sixes. “Suddenly I heard a huge roar when nothing was happening on the field, and I was confused. Then I realised that Shah Rukh Khan had appeared on the screen.”
But what shocked him, said Bhutia, was the lack of involvement of the fans. “No one was upset when his team lost.” In Kolkata, he said, football fans went about weeping and screaming and burning buses when their club lost. “I don’t recommend burning buses, but I would have liked to see more involvement,” he said.
He had put his finger on the problem. The concept of “my” team has not percolated into the club fan’s consciousness in cricket.
The next 16 weeks will see some of these issues in sharper focus.
