T-20

Despite it being undoubtedly exciting and “the future of the game” I do find it hard to give a rat’s kidney about the games which make up the brash cricketing lottery which calls itself Twenty20 or T-20 cricket, the “blink and you’ll miss it” popularist version of the game which is designed to draw in the crowds and fill up the coffers without the crowds necessarily being exposed to the subtlety that is the game being played at its best.

The problem that I have with it, apart from the fact that it’s far too shouty, frantic and commercial, and there’s all that further shouting and “family friendly” snatches of the worst kind of rabble-rousing extracts from pop music to keep “da kidz” amused that once made Ice Hockey so unbearable for me to watch, is that the game itself, rather like football, becomes something of a lottery where one “lucky” (or unlucky, depending upon which team you are supporting) spell can drastically undermine an innings and from which there’s no time to recover.

But it’s probably just me.

After all, “people” (the kind of “people” who just want an afternoon’s entertainment and don’t seem to actually care about the game itself in my humble opinion) appear to enjoy it, so what do I know?

I’ll just stay away, thank you very much, and hope that this brash young upstart, so dependent upon a completely different skill set from my beloved test matches, doesn’t stick the knife in and destroy the game that I enjoy, because to me, as the saying goes, it’s just not cricket.

Whenever they are on, the Twenty20 matches just seem to sort of pass me by, or I find myself half remembering that there is a game on and tune in to find that it’s already over. In the case of the test matches or the fifty-over one-day internationals, that would never happen, but somehow I find myself rather unable to care very much one way or the other when it comes to these games.

After all, one unlucky day and an average team can thrash a much better one with no discernable level of talent being shown, and, because it is such a lottery and down to the luck of the day, you can be two-nil down with one to play in a series without having done anything unduly wrong.

Granted, there are skills which are required, and the crowd-pleasing so-called “Big Hitters” seem to have a large role to play in a game which seems to be mostly defined by how many boundaries are hammered rather than time spent at the crease, which is all well and good in that format, but doesn’t serve the team well in any longer formats of the game and, not only that, leaves the bowlers so bludgeoned, battered and bruised that their confidence can be shot to pieces in a game that really does the specialist bowler very few favours.

To be honest, in the great scheme of things, the games themselves all seem so inconsequential to me that I can barely remember if a game is on to tell the absolute truth… because, to me, it might as well be a baseball match and I really wouldn’t go out of my way to see one of those either.

I don’t know, maybe it’s an age thing, but I would prefer to hear the quiet but significant click of leather on willow drifting across the breeze on a summer’s afternoon rather than some brash extract from a ghastly pop tune any day of the week, but I suspect that nobody’s really interested in what old fuddy-duddies like me might think when there are millions to be made out of spoiling things, and that’s the truth not just in cricket, either.

Now, where did I leave my Panama hat…?