T20 Cricket: All flash, little substance

Chris Gayle recently enraptured cricket followers with a record score of 175 in an IPL game against the Pune Warriors. His unbelievable display contained an unheard of 17 sixes and was made off only 66 deliveries. It was followed, not unexpectedly, by innumerable well-deserved accolades and it shows, in part, why the T20 game has attracted the enormous audience that it has.

Seventeen sixes translates to 102 runs and when his tally of 13 fours is added, it means that the big Jamaican scored 154 runs without having to venture from his crease. It was a staggering performance, and was really a case of the T20 game’s foremost exponent playing its most quintessential innings. Cricket’s briefest form is really about sixes: the batsmen try to hit as many as possible, and the bowlers do their best to prevent them from hitting any. That, in a nutshell, is what the T20 game is.

The Test game, on the other hand, allows time for all kinds of story lines to emerge and play out, and all kinds of strategies to be conceptualized, executed and followed to their end. Over the years, there have been many epic battles that could not have been waged on a T20 battlefield. Recall, if you will, VVS Laxman’s 281 at the Eden Gardens in 2001 that turned around his career, the Test match, the series and the trajectory of Indian cricket, heightening confidence and demanding a new level of respect from opponents.

Remember, also, the stirring contests between Allan Donald and Michael Atherton at Trent Bridge in 1998, and between Atherton and Courtney Walsh on a shiny Sabina Park surface in 1994. Or cast your mind back to January 2011 when Sachin Tendulkar withstood everything the rampaging Dale Steyn flung at him to emerge with a triumphant 146, or Michael Clarke’s clinic on the fleet-footed art of counteracting spin in the first Test of the recent India vs Australia series, or Shikhar Dhawan’s forceful and majestic effort in the third.

Tests provide the context for the colossal feats of skill and endurance that have defined the sport. And while there have been grand performances in T20 cricket as well, they have been rather one-dimensional, mostly involving instances of big hitting, which, along with electric fielding and the occasional incisive bowling performance, are largely all the undersized game has to offer.

But if big hitting becomes commonplace, then it is no longer thrilling. The relative rarity of sixes is the reason they exhilarate in the first place. If they now occur every over, will they have the same effect on the audience? On average, there are less than two home runs per game in Major League Baseball in the USA. What if that number were to increase to, say, twenty per game — would it still be the same? Or what if every boxing match was to end by knockout – would knockouts have the same dramatic effect they now do?

Cricket fans are now asked to subject themselves to a daily overdose of two IPL games for almost two months, and a concomitant daily overdose of big hitting and sixes. The crowds lap it up, much like many choose fast food over a balanced meal – it’s a more convenient and exciting option, even if the nutritional value is virtually non-existent. The instant game commands a large following in an instant generation, but the rudiments of the game are far removed from what cricket used to be.

It could be argued that the organizers are, in a way, undermining one of their chief drawing cards in making the competition so interminably protracted. Brevity was always one of the attractive aspects of the four-hour game, but who could blame the fans if they find their interest diminished well before the end of a very lengthy tournament? And is it not possible that the surfeit of games could have a cloying effect on fans?