T20 calls for a new idiom: ten years later, the search continues

Perhaps it is too early for the T20 aesthetician and the change will have to be in both form and content

The T20 international is ten years old, and awaits the next step in its evolution: the specialist writer.

One who can be read by the non-enthusiast without embarrassment and by the fan without exasperation. All sports finally discover such writers; since T20 is a sport you would rather watch than read about, it might take longer.

But while players have cottoned on to the fact that T20 calls for a different set of skills, those writing about the game haven’t done so yet. We continue to use the language of five-day cricket to capture the lunacy — and I mean this in a positive sense — of the T20 game.

In the journey from the comic to the serious (the inaugural T20 international between Australia and New Zealand in February 2005 featured players in retro whiskers), the players have adapted. But writers struggle for an idiom that is unique and representative.

“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, the Proust of the Papuans?,” asked the novelist Saul Bellow. He was criticised for cultural misappropriation, but his question serves us well here. Who is the Cardus of T20, its Ray Robinson?

Reversal of traditional conceit

Sure, the canvas is smaller, the narrative arc limited, but the writer has some advantages: unlike the longer game, it matters not how you play it, just whether you win or lose. This is a reversal of cricket’s traditional conceit.

The freshly-minted stroke or the creative line of attack is good or bad based only on one criterion: Is it effective?

A swing towards midwicket that takes the top edge and loops over the third man boundary is good. A lovely cover drive that gives the bowler a ‘dot ball’ is bad. T20 reporting is non-judgemental.

Yet, as Michael Atherton pointed out in an article recently, “very few writers have tried to get under the bonnet of T20.”

There is something about the format that attracts focus on everything but the match itself. This might be partly due to the fact that we are watching it through the same glasses we wear to the longer format.

There is too the suspicion that the Cardus of T20 is only around four years old now, and we will have to wait till he grows up and is ready to bring a fresh perspective to the sport.

Test cricket had been played for nearly 50 years before Cardus arrived on the scene to describe its aesthetics. A decade later came Robertson-Glasgow.

The first reports of cricket matches were written in verse in the 18th century. So perhaps it is too early for the T20 aesthetician. The change will have to be in both form and content.

In four editions of the Wisden India Almanack , the T20 reporting comprised six bullet-points per match. It is not a perfect system, but it eliminates needless description and pseudo-analysis. Have bat, will hit ball is the essence of T20, and to impose on it too many elements — artistic, psychological or anything else — is unnecessary.

Another route, suggested by Atherton, is statistical analysis that focuses on impact rather than on performance per se. “It may just allow cricket writers to actually write about the game in front of their eyes rather than around its edges,” he says, while arguing that it is not the match that is often reported, but its context and place in the general scheme of things.

Intimacy of television

There is a third route, based on the intimacy of television. Writers either give names or numbers to the repetitive elements on the field, from the dilscoop to the fielder tapping the ball up on the boundary edge while his momentum carries him out but returning to complete the catch. In the manner that Soumya Sarkar of Bangladesh did at this World Cup.

Just as dilscoop conjures up a specific image, ‘ sarkaring ’ (only an example here, obviously Sarkar isn’t the first player to do this) does so too.

This will free up space for those events that occur for the first time. T20 is extending the limits of the possible and we need a shorthand to identify events that have occurred before.

Without necessarily going back to 18th century verse, the call may be to adapt the tightness and constraints of poetry.

A sonnet, however beautiful and pregnant with meaning, ends in 14 lines.

Rather than imitate the volatility of the T20 game, perhaps we should go in the opposite direction and bring to the prose the precision of poetry, using symbols that are easily understood.

It will happen. Not perhaps in the manner outlined above, maybe in ways we haven’t considered yet.

As T20 cricket evolves, so will the writing present a truer picture, unencumbered by the past.

An analogy might be the best writings on art, which translate non-verbal experiences into the verbal. If watching T20 is an emotional experience, reading about it could appeal to a different part of ourselves.