Twenty20 is just not cricket

Convincing as Twenty20 cricket has become, it would be dangerous for the game to lose sight of the advantages that are still clear in 50-over cricket, writes Mark Nicholas in the Daily Telegraph.

Twenty20 is exciting because it is condensed. It is the natural heir to the 40-over cricket that quickly established itself in the late Sixties as the "new black" – hip, fast, accessible and satisfying. Previously unseen audiences were as seduced then as they are now. Forty years on, it is obvious to everyone except the people who run the game in England day-to-day, that the 40-over format is a white elephant. In fact, it is more dangerous than that. It is an energy sapper, an injury-sucker and a diversion from the accepted formats that are played everywhere else in the world.

Nicholas also requests Kevin Pietersen to stop bleating and just get on with his game.

In the same publication, Mike Atherton says that Twenty20 cricket is a threat to the game's future. Atherton's view is that the appetite for Twenty20 is insatiable, and he's ready to lay a large wager that eventually 50-over cricket will be rendered extinct as a result.

James Lawton shares similar views in his column in the Independent.

Twenty20 is not cricket. It does not have growth, that sublime building of skill and concentration and timing which makes the Test game so ultimately intriguing – nor much of the declining, but sometimes still visible, fundamental qualities of the game which are offered down the food chain until, as in the crudest making of an omelette, the eggs are smashed in the version which is now having imposed upon it, in another money-grubbing lunge, the dignity of a world title.

In the process, cricket uses up its prime talent with the profligacy of a doomed punter chasing from one casino to another.

Over in the Times, David Fulton feels England's top sports stars are resorting to the blandest of platitudes. Fulton too criticises Pietersen's call to "humiliate" Australia by knocking them out of the World Twenty20 - which backfired spectacularly, by the way - and wonders how KP felt it would somehow serve as an act of revenge for the Ashes whitewash.