Two runs a ball, please

I do not believe the pressure is predominantly on the batsmen in 20-20, but rather on the captain and the fielders. While many people may be scratching their heads saying "Fielders, when did they start to matter?", but it's true. While in test or even one days, even if you drop a batsman, you've got the rest of the innings to atone for your mistakes. 20-20, you don't have that time. The captain has the weight of the world on his shoulders for the same reason: if he shifts the field and opens a lane for the batsman to strike at, that can tilt the balance of the match entirely. While the batsmen do have a difficult task in managing the run rates in 20-20, no batting effort can win a match if the fielders give up 15 runs an over.

Some times it happens that instead of giving a single, the fielders give two runs so that the hard hitting batsman do not get the strike. Similarly a wide also helps. If the umpire does not catch you, you get away with a marginally wider delivery.

20-20 cricket, in my opinion, creates opportunities for both the batsman and the bowler. It is NOT a batsman's game. In fact, in this format, the BATSMAN IS EVEN MORE VULNERABLE. This is because he is trying to play a shot almost every single ball, and it takes ONLY ONE MIS-HIT FROM THE BATSMAN to get his wicket.

I would really like to add a comment: I sooo wish I could see bowlers like Jeff Thomson, Malcolm Marshall, or Michael Holding in this 20-20 tournament! It would be such an awesome contest between bowlers like them and the big hitting 20-20 batsmen of today!!!

No pressure on the bowlers at all. Batsmen have no time to settle, no time to go defensive after fall of a wicket, no chance to judge a ball and leave. The number of dismissals due to 'mishit' proves it all.

Forget what the purists think - get rid of Test and 50 over cricket. The teams are so closely matched and the matches are fascinating. You will see more upsets in Twenty 20 than any other cricketing format. Twenty 20 is the way forward.

I don't agree with that since there are 11 persons looking to hit any bowler out of the ground on each bowl and certainly this approach creates more pressure on bowlers as compared to batsmen. And we can see that the bowlers are getting smashed to every part of ground and the average for most of them is above 7, this clearly indicates how much pressure they are in to get even two dot balls even if they have more oppurtunities to get the batsmen out still the pressure clearly shows. They are confined not only to two balls but also to get wickets else there is no meaning behind getting two dots and four sixes. If it would have been so that the batsmen would have been under so much pressure, we couldn't have seen the matches with such high runrates infact even sometimes loosing the wickets early but still getting the score to 180+.

So it clearly states that the pressure on the bowlers is much higher as compared to batsmen.

Just to make this concept a little more interesting, and to pile on more pressure on the batsmen, I think that a new method of dismissal in this form of game should be seriously considered. In addition to the tally of balls faced and runs scored, there should be a counter of number of dot balls faced. A batsman should be allowed a maximum of 25 dot balls, say, after which he is automatically declared out - slow. We'll leave it to the class of the batsman to make 10 runs or 100 before he gets to the 25 dot ball mark.

Well, before the T20 WC began a lot of people felt that this would be a graveyard for the bowlers but a week into the tournament the prophecy is yet to come true. In fact, if anything the bowlers have been the heroes. And, honestly I am not surprised because if one looks closely the format challenges the batsmen more than the bowlers. For one, there are only 20 overs which means that the batsmen have virtually no time to settle, they must score at least a run a ball and preferably more. The bowlers on the other hand can get away with a 7-8 run an over rate and always have the chance to pick wickets with the batsmen taking risks. So, in short its the batters who need to make all the moves and face constant pressure.

You point out one painful aspect of Twenty20 - a batsman who scores too slowly, even for a few overs, can ruin his team's innings. It is a perverse situation because the slower he bats, the longer he is likely to stay in there and the more damage he can do to his team. Because of this, I think it is important to give captains the ability to remove a batsman without waiting for him to get himself out. Such a batsman could return if/when the rest of team has batted around. "Retired captain's discretion" might be an embarrassment for the player in question, but it is no worse than being substituted mid-match in any other sport.

Yes, absolutaly. It was belived that this shorter version of game will put immense pressure on bowlers, but what we can see that batsmen are under more pressure than bowlers. They not only have to score runs at a brisk rate but also have to keep their wicket intact.