Bigger, faster, greedier

It is wholly appropriate that this is being published the week after over 800 runs were scored in a day. It would have felt even more right had India gone past 443, the highest score in a 50-over game, and Sri Lanka had gone on to better it. It's been that sort of a decade. There has been a glut of everything: there have been more matches, more runs per match, more runs per over, more dollars per match, more ads per over, and more noise on our television screens.

But yet, this will not be remembered as the Decade of Excess. Yes, there has been lots of money, and a lot of runs. But far more significantly, it has been the Decade of Change.

Not just any change. But once-in-a-generation Change. Path-altering, future-shaping and game-changing Change. Change so radical and so outrageous that it couldn't have been foreseen, much less planned. Much of it has caught most people unaware, and it has left the world of cricket feeling a mixture of confusion, excitement and apprehension.

In 2007, three of India's biggest cricketers, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly, made themselves unavailable for selection for the inaugural World Twenty20 on the grounds that the shortest version of the game belonged to the young and adventurous. But about six months after the young and adventurous had won India the trophy, these three were leading their local franchises as icon players in the first edition of the IPL. In those six months cricket had changed more than it had in the previous 30 years.

Though everyone can see and feel the changes, very few, if any, can precisely spell out what they mean. Is Twenty20 cricket's passport to the future or is it set to obliterate the past? Will the franchise system make for a more equitable distribution of wealth, or will it ultimately devalue the bilateral cricket that has been game's pinnacle? Will those seduced by the instant appeal of Twenty20 grow to appreciate the longer versions of the game, or will they be drawn away from the more languorous but time-consuming pleasures of Test cricket? Will the spirit of the free market liberate the game from the clutches of self-serving administrators, or will it lead to calamitous chaos?

But we are getting ahead of the story now. Let's focus on what we can comprehend. Here are a few things that happened to the game in the last 10 years.

Cricket shed whatever traces it bore of a genteel amateur sport and became a ruthless business. It even defied the global recession and grew. As a consequence, the sport was taken over by television. The simplest way to generate more money was to play more. And in order to deliver full value, the matches needed to last the distance.

And so pitches grew flatter and flatter. Perth lost pace, Sydney stopped turning square, India stopped producing mud cakes, life went out of West Indian pitches, and batting averages swelled.

Among batsmen to have scored more than 5000 Test runs in the 1990s, only three averaged over 50. Two of them, Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara, were geniuses, and the third, Steve Waugh, had to earn every run.

This decade, that number swelled to 13. Among them are Ricky Ponting, Rahul Dravid and Inzamam-ul-Haq, great batsmen in their own right, but all three averaged below 50 in the 90s.

In the 90s, top-order batsmen came up against Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Glenn McGrath, Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. McGrath and Pollock were still around in the 2000s, but the leading wicket-takers among the fast men were Makhaya Ntini and Brett Lee, and both averaged on the wrong side of 25.

Inevitably, India became the most powerful cricket nation. It had always had the passion and the audience; over the last two decades it found administrators who had the drive and imagination to exploit those resources. Among them was Lalit Modi, who would stop at nothing. Also, India finally found a group of players who could stand up as a team against the very best.

The 90s were all about geopolitics. The subcontinent earned the right to host the 1996 World Cup by pulling its weight together. The term "Asian bloc" was still in use in the first half of this decade, but then the Indian money got so big that votes ceased to matter. Australia and South Africa became India's new best friends. England, a diminishing power in the earlier decade, found itself further marginalised; it again came up with a new game, Twenty20, and was quickly overtaken at it.

But while the boards were cosying up, Sydneygate showed up cricket's ugliest face and left a fracture that would just not mend. At Cricinfo we feel it most acutely in the comments posted on articles, where almost every other day discussions somehow degenerate to bickering, name-calling and worse. Between Indians and Australians, Sydney always finds a mention.

The irrelevance of the ICC grew. Rather, the board members chose to limit the influence of the executive. Consequently, the ICC failed to act decisively on many crucial issues, including Zimbabwe, chucking, and the crowding of the cricket calendar. It even failed to implement its own Future Tours Programme: the top countries played who they wanted, when they wanted. The failure of the members to work on a common agenda is evident in the dithering over the next Future Tours Programme, on which hinges the future of international cricket.

The Indian Premier League overshadowed everything else. Judging by how meticulously it was executed, you couldn't have guessed that its arrival was hastened by the Indian Cricket League, an unsanctioned enterprise that was squashed with a ruthlessness that bordered on vulgarity.

In hindsight it can be said that the IPL had everything going for it. The Indian economy was sunny and entrepreneurial zeal was at its peak. The BCCI had enough clout to get other important members on board. India had just won the World Twenty20. And most importantly, the audience was ready. But back then it was an audaciously visionary idea, and ambitious to the point of brazenness. It needed a man possessed by it to pull it off, and found one in Modi. The players were sold on it immediately, and the moment the audience gave it resounding approval, it was clear that cricket would never be the same again.

So we return to our questions. The last 10 years have been breathless, tumultuous, acrimonious, chaotic, crass, and unintentionally seminal. How the coming years will shape up will depend largely on the beliefs and wisdom of the men who govern the game.

The biggest challenge before them is to find a semblance of coherence in the cricket calendar. The number of Tests increased from 347 in the 90s to 464 in this decade, and ODIs from 933 to 1402. Add the IPL, the Champions League and the World Twenty20 and the quantity is simply unsustainable. Forget what it might do to the players, the bigger threat to the game is what it might do to spectators.

This decade began with an abominable crisis. It will end with a crisis of a different kind, but fuelled by the same vice: greed. Match-fixing shook the foundations of the game and tested the faith of its followers. Cricket overload is robbing the game of all sense of occasion and context and testing the passion of the fans.

Unquestionably cricket acquired unimaginable riches in the noughties. The coming decade will tell us if the game lost its soul in the bargain.

Coming up over the next two weeks in Cricinfo's look back at the decade: Gideon Haigh on the ICC, Peter Roebuck on the age of the bat, Osman Samiuddin on cricket's power shift, Rob Steen on what lies ahead, Andrew Miller on the decline of England, Rahul Bhattacharya on Indian cricket's period of madness, Peter English on the evolving role of the coach, Ashok Malik on how TV has shaped cricket, Siddhartha Vaidyanathan on the lot of the fan in the 2000s, the Player of the Decade, as voted by an all-star jury, and more.