Taking sides

The brief for Different Strokes is to be personal rather than analytical. Good: I find it very hard indeed to be dispassionate about cricket. Without passion, cricket is merely an arcane ritual of interest only to the participants and anthropologists with a taste for the bizarre.

Naturally I pay lip-service to the Corinthian ideal of a good contest, but I don’t really mean it. The last thing I want when one of my teams is playing is a good contest. What I want is for my team to win, and if it can do so without causing palpitations, sweaty palms and nail-biting, then I am entirely satisfied. As I write, Middlesex have won five games in a row, and only the first, the championship game against Derbyshire, was anything less than a walloping. What with England doing rather nicely against the Kiwis over the weekend and even Yorkshire finally managing to win a T20 yesterday, I am a pretty happy bunny right now.

Victory is all the sweeter when it comes against your traditional rivals, which in county cricket usually means your next-door neighbours. Beating Essex three times in a week is pretty good, but giving them three comprehensive towellings is even better.

In the championship game, overcast conditions gave us an early advantage which we proceeded to cash in on to the eventual tune of an innings win, but Essex still played as though they meant it. The T20s, though, were another matter. At Lord’s, Essex’s batting was clueless, a succession of skied catches meaning they did not even reach 120, which they followed up by dropping half a dozen chances as Eoin Morgan gave us a bit of a show on the waltz to triumph, then at Chelmsford they were undone by a hat-trick from Nannes in his second over and Middlesex again strolled home. If the prospect of millions from the Champions League is supposed to be concentrating county cricketers’ minds, the conclusion to be drawn is that Essex’s are concentrating on blue funk.

But while Middlesex supporters have been ecstatic and Essex’s are no doubt pretending to their office colleagues that it’s just a blip and has nothing to do with them smashing their coffee mug, these games have involved little to please the neutral observer.

The myth of T20 is that it’s a batsman’s game. It was, in the beginning when bowlers hadn’t a clue about what to do, but it is rapidly changing. Now bowlers have realised that if the batsman is always on the attack, he exposes vulnerabilities and they can bowl to exploit them, especially the slow bowlers. If the team bowling first is successful, then the evening of thrills and spills rather peters out – as we also saw when England played New Zealand.

The runaway success of T20 has had a lot to do with its novelty. It’s brought in a whole new audience who have had thrills a-plenty as a bunch of highly-experienced cricketers have tried to get to grips with an unfamiliar format. As they discover the best ways to play, though - and with the huge amount of attention now being paid to it, they will be straining every mental sinew to find them – it’s entirely possible that T20 will be tactically mined-out within a few years, a fate which has already largely befallen the 50-over format.

For the partisan supporters, this is unlikely to be a problem. For us, what matters is whether we won or lost, and how we played the game comes a distant second.

But the dollar signs lighting up the eyes of players and administrators are predicated on T20 remaining enough of a white-knuckle ride to attract vast armies of new audience, and professional teams cannily using their experience to produce a game which resembles arm-wrestling more than jousting knights in armour will end up leaving the cash registers idle. If the T20 balloon deflates, the jolt when we hit the ground could be painful.

I’d much rather that didn’t happen. I love the exuberance of T20 and its emphasis on quick and accurate decision-making under pressure; first class cricket is all about strategy while T20 is purely tactics, and it’s a special sport which can accommodate forms which show off both to such advantage. Let us hope that the golden egg does not kill the goose.