Simon Barnes

Quality is what counts in T20 debate

Any debate in English cricket between the modernisers and traditionalists about the future of T20 should come down to one simple fact: the quality of the sport

Simon Barnes
Simon Barnes
13-Jan-2015
Cricket is currently involved in a war between two sentimentalities. It's perceived as a battle between tradition and innovation: between past and future: between powerful feeling about history and a hard-headed understanding of the commercial opportunities offered by the modern world. One side prides itself on its grasp of reality: the other on its certainty that reality is represented by something more valuable than money.
But as cricket lovers in England, influenced by rising crowds in the Big Bash League, debate whether franchised Twenty20 must ultimately play a role in the development of the English game, it becomes clear that the essential argument is between one form of sentimentality and another. One half of this polarised debate is concerned with sentimentality about the past: the other with sentimentality about the future.
The great pleasure of adopting the second stance is that you pretend you are not sentimental at all: that your vision is unclouded by outmoded tastes and traditions: that you can see plainly what needs to be done, unencumbered by the shibboleths and posturing of the past… like the Italian Futurists, with their glorious visions of a new world of rickety aeroplanes and wobbly motor-cars, and their declaration that the only way forward for Venice was to tear down the palazzos and fill the Grand Canal with their rubble to make a super-highway.
Cricket grounds have always tried to cultivate that rus in urbe thing: the feeling that when you enter a cricket ground you escape from city life
So the cricketing futurists declare that the only way forward is to scrap the 18 counties (at the very last for the purposes of Twenty20) and to make cricket a truly urban game, as citified as football, one that responds to the needs of the people of a city while eliciting satisfying cries of pain from people who love the counties and believe that cricket is essential rural.
The truth is that spectator sport always has its roots in the centre of major cities, and cricket is no different. Do Lancashire have their country ground in Lancaster; do Warwickshire identify heart and soul with Warwick? Is Yorkshire cricket based in York? Gloucestershire in Gloucester? Do Middlesex and Surrey play in the leafiest areas within the county boundaries?
I think not. County cricket was invented after the Industrial Revolution and was built along the main railway lines. To say that cricket - as a professional spectator sport - is a city game is merely recognition of what has been a truth of cricket for a century and a half.
It's an uncomfortable truth, though, because part of cricket's attraction is the sense that it is cut off from the common run of events. Cricket grounds have always tried to cultivate that rus in urbe thing: the feeling that when you enter a cricket ground you escape from city life and all the tensions of business.
Thus MCC member cherish the trees at the Nursery End, grounds like Worcester are specially admired and they planted a tree to replace the old one within the boundary at Canterbury. For some cricket lovers the run-stealers still flicker to and fro, to and fro, the church clock still stands at ten to three and there is honey still for tea.
And that sense of continuity is valuable, nor is it entirely restricted to people unfamiliar with social media. You'd have to be inflamed with all the Futurists' sentimentality to believe that disposing of history is possible, let alone desirable.
That's because sport is not the same as fashion. Sport is part of culture, and it has deep and stubborn roots. When football was the pariah sport of the 1980s, some people believed that a new fad for American football would take over. But football is not a fashion statement: the game burst out more popular than ever before. To think that people - especially cricket people - will cast aside ancient loyalties as a fashion statement is naïve, to say the least.
But it seems to me that both sides on this debate are missing the point. This has also turned into a debate about money: about the best way to ensure that cricket makes pots of the stuff.
Here's a piece of advice: if you want to make money, get out of cricket. There are a thousand areas of life where you can make an awful lot more, and if money is your priority then I suggest you choose one of them. To go into cricket in England with a view to making your fortune is perverse.
Let me present a revolutionary suggestion instead: let's set aside the notion of cricket as money-spinner and ask this question: what is the best possible sport we can produce? How can we provide the best possible opportunity for the production of sporting excellence? If we start from that question, rather than questions about money, the whole issue changes.
Seen that way, it's less an issue about revolutionary change or about radical fogeyism: it's something to do with sport itself. And that brings you to the less sexy notion that the present situation has value - but it will die unless it develops. Like just about everything else.
At the heart of the argument there is no argument: because that's where you always find the question about sporting excellence and with it, the certainty that this is what matters
If you are involved in producing sport, then your priority should be as a facilitator of excellence: in providing the format that produces the finest possible sport, fusing tradition with judicious change. It's my belief that if you do that, people will come and watch, and sponsors and advertisers will flock to have their names associated with it.
Here are three examples of that principle in action: the Olympic Games, Wimbledon tennis and Test match cricket between England and Australia.
Any notion that cricket has never changed and never needs to change is clearly absurd: but the counter-notion - that if change is inevitable then everything must be changed - is equally flawed.
Franchise cricket's loudest voices seem to have adapted Sigue Sigue Sputnik as role model. This was the 1980s band whose motto was "Fleece the World" and who included paid adverts between tracks on their album. Every gimmick was there - save the only one that lasts, which is musical excellence.
Sport should prioritise sport. Oddly enough, that's what its core audience is looking for.

Simon Barnes is a former chief sportswriter of the Times and the author of more than 20 books