The value of Twenty20

Twenty20 attracts to a point because it is not supposed to be taken too seriously, writes Rohit Brijnath in the Sportstar.

Twenty20 was invented by someone who grew up with ‘Rollerball’ posters in his room, and whose idea of understatement is Clint Eastwood with a six-gun and a scowl.

It’s a game that is the remarkable mix of many stolen parts: it has borrowed the idea that plot is irrelevant from Van Damme movies, it’s scrounged the concept of “music at changeovers” from the U.S. Open tennis, it’s spawned its own version of basketball’s dancing girls, it’s crude version of football’s penalty shoot-out, it’s got a hockey-style on-ground bench, and bears a resemblance to golf with its bizarre rules (what in God’s name is the free hit, some might well ask?). All that’s left is for Twenty20 to become a contact sport.

But, Brijnath goes on to admit, Twenty20 is enjoyable perhapsbecause it is new, because India is winning and because it makes one feel younger.

Twenty20 is the future, but it’s also the past. The game we embrace now is the one we left behind. Every shot played by Yuvraj that night against England was only an echo of our boyhood, when the water tank at the end of the lane was six, you couldn’t hit square because you might interfere with Mr. Ghosh’s breakfast, and if you took more than two singles in a row you were a nerd.

Michael Henderson is suitably less impressed with the format. He writes in the Daily Telegraph:

No matter how loudly people cheer, silence is always more memorable at a sporting event than noise... There may be some merit in this new-fangled game if an interest in it leads some of those young people towards the less immediate but altogether richer rewards of Test cricket. But surely I am not alone in thinking that the inaugural ICC World Twenty20, won by India, was not quite as remarkable as stout Cortez stumbling across the Pacific.