Today we welcome new writer Richard Willmett to TFT. He has some thoughts on T20 and why, despite its apparent entertainment value, the format could be made so much better …
There wasn’t a great deal left by the time COVID had swept through; the pernicious virus couldn’t help itself. Rather than simply being content with killing swathes of the population it sought to compound its horrific physical and economic effects by also attacking some of life’s peripheral distractions, the sort which bring richness to us all. Amongst many other things, COVID wanted to kill the Cricket season.
And it made a decent fist of it too. Back in March, England’s tour to Sri Lanka was abandoned before the Tests could be played. Building on a theme, the County Championship, hitherto only susceptible to Hitler’s jackboot (and Colin Graves’ leather-look grey slip-ons) was put on hold for the year. In a major change of plans, Graves was even forced to shelve his own novel virus – a version of the game seemingly designed to promote the twin benefits of decimalisation and the eating of crisps.
The remnants – that which could be salvaged in the springtime rush to batten down hatches and sanitise every surface – was a curious melange. England would welcome the summer tourists as planned, though they would be reduced to playing in front of the sort of attendances only witnessed in nine of the twelve Test-playing nations. Domestic tyros would be afforded the opportunity to run in for both some red Ball games and the T20 Blast[1]. Aside from these, the only other outlet afforded to the newly time-rich and cricket-hungry masses would be the Caribbean Premier League and, as a consequence, I was rather keen to see as much of it as I could.
I was hoping that increased familiarity might lead to some form of personal conversion. T20 had not exactly passed me by; I’d watched a reasonable amount since its emergence in 2003 but had always been unable to fully engage with tournaments other than the Blast on an ongoing basis. The IPL seemed to arrive just as teaching commitments were ratcheted up to DEFCON 2 in preparation for the summer exams and the Big Bash – as well as being commonly broadcast at times when I lacked consciousness – tended to lose out to the medical imperative that requires me to follow every down of the College and NFL football seasons. Something had to give, and it always ended up being franchise cricket.
I resolved that this year, however, I would fully engage. With little alternative to sate the appetite, save for some intermittent forays onto the gloomy fields of Old Trafford and Southampton, my anticipation of the CPL reached the sort of level I commonly reserve only for takeaway deliveries and the latest Le Carré. Being largely unfamiliar with the CPL I did my research on the essentials and discovered in the process that “Zouk”, after which the St. Lucia franchise is named, is a form of regional music – the sort that Paul Simon would likely have embraced in the 1980s if his wanderings had taken him beyond South Africa. Furthermore, I learned that “Tallawah” – the identifier of the Jamaican team – refers to the island’s inherent fearlessness, the word presumably developed for anyone who went within eight feet of Sabina Park’s 1998 Test strip. Suitably conversant in the nomenclature and having boned up on the history of the tournament, I settled in to enjoy the season.
I regret to say that at the time of writing – twenty four games later – I am still waiting.
I certainly haven’t expected to be blown away by every Contest, not least owing to the limitations COVID has brought. There has been a slew of top-level withdrawals of overseas personnel – travel restrictions and personal concerns having robbed the tournament of the likes of Hales, Stoinis and Nortje, all of whom would have added lustre to proceedings. Having to play the tournament at two Trinidadian hubs – the Brian Lara Cricket Academy and the Queen’s Park Oval – means that conditions for play have been less varied than they might be. These factors are compounded by what is clearly the biggest restriction, the lack of a crowd. This summer we’ve all been forced to become accustomed to contests denuded of both roaring cheers (sadly) and the Barmy Army’s metronomic renditions of “Don’t Take Me Home” (happily), but this format in particular is robbed of a key part of its essence when the seats serve only as a convenient hiding place for recent boundaries.
None of this can be helped, of course. That there has been any cricket to watch at all is undoubtedly a wonderful achievement and firm evidence of the determined resilience possessed by those responsible for the CPL. However, sustained viewing of franchise T20 for the first time has given me the chance to contemplate the offering in ways I have not before and, sadly, that rumination has led to a number of uncomfortable and inescapable conclusions.
This all started when I couldn’t work out why I was so bored. Game followed game without my pulse being raised in any meaningful way and I struggled to see why. Some of the contests had a modicum of dramatic tension as scores flirted in close proximity with one another. However, despite such relative highlights I couldn’t motivate myself to care. I kicked around a host of potential reasons as to why. Perhaps I possessed a newly dispassionate perspective, brought on by living in a world with COVID? Maybe the lack of tangible off-field engagement was too great to overcome? It could be, of course, that my lack of connection was simply evidence that I possessed no soul whatsoever… What I came to realise, however, is that the problem was something much more prosaic and yet also much more fundamental. The games failed to spark my persistent interest owing to the near-complete absence of cricket’s essential contest.
The most basic element of our game is the contest between bat and ball. This is what has always provided my continued appetite over three decades for what the uninitiated often dismiss as a repetitive, boring procession. In red ball cricket the unfolding of most deliveries is predicated on the notion that the bowler – the strike bowler – is searching to find a way past the batsman’s defences. The varying of speed, angle of attack, swing and so on is largely designed to find a way to take a wicket and it is only occasionally intended to achieve much else. Aside from when a team is 312-2 and the bowlers are heading for a new ball in six overs’ time, there are few situations which can be dismissed as non-threatening for a batsman. Each ball matters; as a fan you don’t want to miss a single one and your attention is consequently held.
T20 reverses that contest. In their admirable Wisden Book of the Year Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution, Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde rightly identify this as a “paradigm shift”. They point out that at the moment of its creation, this format ensured that “defence ceased to matter”. The batsmen, newly-capable of shots only seen fitfully before 2003, became the predators. The security those batsmen now feel owing to the reduced value of their wicket – all ten only having to last 120 balls, rather than two days – grants a logical license for animalistic exuberance. The bowlers, consequently neutered, often wander around with the air of cuckolds, no longer fixated on the production of a glorious jaffa, but rather on that of the standard dot ball. They rarely seek to splay the stumps or tempt the parsimonious opener to flash at a lifter outside off stump – they care only for that dot. Reducing the scoring rate is the supreme goal. When wickets are forthcoming, they invariably involve a mistimed heave into the outfield or a looping dolly to the covers. The default is for the batsman to give his wicket away – in a manner that would have led to punishment when I was at school – rather than having it forcibly taken from him.
The payoff for this shift is a display of attacking batting intent which would gladden any heart. The well-struck lofted drive, thudding compellingly into the concrete stairs of the upper deck is undeniably something worth seeing. The agility and skill required of the batsman to send the ball off on its unlikely trajectory cannot be simply dismissed as a slog – it takes talent. However, when the broadcasters tell you that Kieron Pollard’s smite into eternity is the 124th Hero Maximum of the tournament, it feels somewhat less impactful. You even start to question whether or not you might be able to score a Hero Maximum or two of your own, given the consistent diet of wide-ish long hops and full bungers that the bowlers, desperate to stop the haemorrhaging, are reduced to serving up.
To force bowlers to work against every instinctive part of their nature in an effort to deliberately produce balls just bad enough they can’t be hit, feels like a cruel experiment indeed. And to be genuinely, consistently entertaining action has to be slightly unexpected and these barrages are anything but. As viewers, we have been spoiled by the expectation of dazzling attacks, to the point where they now barely register. To make matters worse, the pitches – on official insistence – are deliberately prepared to favour the hitters, prioritising the sponsors’ visibility with those boundary ads over the quality of the sport and to please a boundary-hungry demographic on whom the beauty and subtlety of the original game seems entirely wasted. And so, the situation perpetuates itself.
I am not a zealot for the red ball. I get as bored as the next person when it’s 312-2 and the road prepared is performing as advertised. However, when stuck temporarily in the doldrums I know a Test will usually pick up, and that the genuine contest between bat and ball will be back. The same cannot be said for T20, sadly.
Despite my annoyance at what I see as the counter-intuitive bowler-batsman relationship, I hope that I am not an example of those people Wigmore and Wilde identify as perpetuating “the inherent snobbery…within the sport”. I don’t want to malign T20, I really want it to work. I want it to be better; to provide more of the fascination I experience when I watch longer forms of the game while still attracting those it currently delights. I believe it can do this.
Short form cricket is not going away, at a club, national or international level and it is evidently hugely popular worldwide. However, the game is also often eminently forgettable. Contests, even enjoyably close ones, rarely live long in the memory and it is for that reason that I want the cricketing world to turn its thoughts to tweaks of the laws and the setup of T20 which might stop the product being so disposable and so formulaic.
How can we tighten the contest between bat and ball in just 120 deliveries? Might it help to relax the stipulations requiring pitches to be prepared as tedious featherbeds, little more than launchpads for artillery bombardment of punters in the stands? Is there merit in rewarding the batting side with a certain number of bonus runs at the end of their allotted overs if they still have wickets in hand? Is it desirable to allow two of a team’s bowlers to have an allocation of five overs each, rather than four, as suggested by Shane Warne? Maybe we could try a combination of all three of these ideas, just for starters? There are a thousand different potential changes which could redress the current imbalance without altering the fundamentals of the game in terms of length. Such changes could genuinely make this spectacle – cricket’s most user-friendly, accessible and lucrative version – not only more exciting but also, crucially, much more engaging.
Far from wanting to tear it down, I want to enhance it. Who’s with me?
Richard Willmett
[1] A competition with the survival instincts of the sea sponge that will still be filling venues and yet disappointing administrators long after human life is extinct.
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