About Twenty-20 cricket

I watched parts of the first ICC Twenty-20 match yesterday. I believe it is in line with the trend of the time and is bound to succeed. It is good that ICC has formalized the rules of T-20 to make it a mainstream game. I don't know if the dresscode of cheerleading squad is 'official', though :-)

As batsmen get used to the T-20 format, they will learn that it is possible to score runs of many balls that they used to just defend all these days. This will have an impact on the one-day cricket as well, just as the one-day cricket had an impact on test-cricket. More and more one-day games will see scores above 300 now.

The idea was simple. People don't have patience to spend a whole day watching a game of cricket, so the game has been shortened to meet people's tastes. Purists obviously don't like this experiment. They argue that T-20 makes the game lose it's character, skillful batting becomes irrelevant, the game is demoralizing to bowlers and so on. However, when one-day games were introduced, a lot of people opposed this 'dilution' of the game, but slowly got used to the idea of a game that finishes on the same day as it begins. Of course, there are people who still believe test cricket is the only 'pure' form of cricket, but such people are bound to be extinct in a few years.