Why Twenty20 vision is impaired

He is not a chap whose boots I would normally be prepared to lick, but I must express my gratitude to Lord MacLaurin for advancing the cause of 20-over cricket a decade ago. The hoots of derision with which the idea was initially greeted are not remembered now. And much as I’d love to see such games played over two innings per side – cricket without second chances is like a BLT sandwich without the B - I have few quibbles with the philosophy or the format. Unless, that is, it results in the sort of farce a friend of mine endured yesterday.

He went to Canterbury to see Kent entertain Essex with some friends. They were a little late, arriving in the middle of the fifth over, saw four balls bowled and then watched it tip down, driving the players off for about two hours. The match eventually resumed at 5.30, with a good two and a half hours of pristine daylight to go – oodles of time to complete the remaining 35 overs. Or so you would have thought. Instead, Kent had to stick on what they had and the visitors were left score 50 in five overs under the dear old Duckworth-Lewis.

Never mind that they received a damn good finish for their money. Never mind that James Middlebrook was caught about 10 yards in from the boundary going for the winning runs off the final ball. My pal and his pals went home in bright sunshine at 6pm. “Bizarre and rather unsatisfactory,” began his post-mortem. He also thought the “parking pricy (£10), catering poor - almost exclusively of the burger and chips variety, and public address utterly inaudible on our side of the ground”.

“Isn't it about time cricket showed rather more consideration for the casual fan?” he wrote in an email when he got home. “If not 20 overs, they could certainly have played say 15 or even 10 and still finished before it got dark.” I didn’t think it appropriate to remind him he has long been the fiercest defender of D/L I know, but that’s by-the-by.

In seeking to shoehorn games into baseball-sized chunks, cricket has done much to inspire a new generation of followers, broaden its constituency and show up the 50-over variant to be as fresh as a decade-old strawberry. All that said, incidents such as this underline the dangers of excessive dumbing-down. Let’s hope the South Africans don’t have the same nonsense planned for the World Championship.