Make or break for the English T20 season
With the Friends life T20 tournament starting in England on June 1, Will Hawkes analyses why audiences were at a low last year, in the Independent
Dustin Silgardo
25-Feb-2013
With the Friends life T20 tournament starting in England on June 1, Will Hawkes analyses why audiences were at a low last year, in the Independent. The two big problems for England's domestic Twenty20 tournament, he says, is that it will always be second to the Indian Premier League and it is not taken seriously enough by the ECB.
India's flagship event may have had a difficult year but it is undeniably the blue riband of Twenty20 tournaments. It has the crowds (albeit diminished in 2011), the big names and, most importantly, the money. Many of those young cricketers who do well in this year's Friends Life T20 will be dreaming, perhaps above all, of an IPL contract.
In the Daily Telegraph, Steve James suggests the problems may go beyond that and that perhaps fans have started to find the format boring and predictable.
Of course, Twenty20 can be exciting, but it remains a shallow game that has become more formulaic with time. I was watching one Twenty20 match with a current player last season, and before every ball of one over, by just observing the field positioning, he called correctly the ball that was to be bowled and the shot that was to be played in response. “It’s boring,” he said.
Dustin Silgardo is a former sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo