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Twenty20 should avoid pitfalls of one-dayers

Martin Crowe, who invented the now-defunct CricketMax has suggested that Twenty20 needs new ideas to survive

Cricinfo staff
24-Aug-2005


Martin Crowe was the inventor of Cricket Max © Getty Images
Martin Crowe, who invented the now-defunct CricketMax, a short form of the game that had a `MaxZone' area where runs counted double, has suggested that Twenty20 needs new ideas to survive.
Crowe, 42, who last month was overtaken by Stephen Fleming as New Zealand's highest runs-scorer in Tests, endorsed a short-form of the game. "I certainly believe [in] what I call a third-generation game, [and] I think there's a future. We came unstuck with ours because I think New Zealand didn't feel they were perhaps getting global support, so they slowly downgraded it. Twenty20 is the same sort of thing, although it's branded differently."
Twenty20 has so far prospered at the domestic level in England and South Africa, but Australia remains reticent about starting such a domestic competition. Lord's had more than 21,000 paying customers attend the match between Middlesex and Surrey last summer.
Crowe said changes were needed to Twenty20. "I feel with no zones, in a 20-over, one-innings game, it's really just a diluted form of the one-day game," he said. "The one-day game at the moment I think is a little ho-hum in itself. I think it needs a tweak."
But Crowe also said that one-day players should be able to prosper at Twenty20. "One-day sides should basically make up the Twenty20 side, and you'll get the odd player who is just ideally suited to Twenty20; someone like Andrew Symonds, for example." Symonds scored the quickest Twenty20 hundred when he crushed 112 from 43 balls against Middlesex for Kent in July.
Australia and New Zealand are scheduled to contest a Twenty20 international in Auckland in February.