Twenty-20 Cricket- A True Reflection of Life Today

“Half the size, double the fun”

I used to be a cricket fanatic, a long time ago. After the Greg Chapell fiasco, and BCCI politics, I somehow lost interest in the game altogether. People around me kept raving about the Australian team, players came and went, but I chose to remain ignorant about the game I once watched with fervour. Then came along Twenty-20 cricket. At first I thought, it was just another ploy for the cricket boards and the players to make more money ( as if they weren’t doing so already!! ). People thronged in masses to watch this variant of the game, sponsors were overjoyed, they poured in more money. Players were happy, since if you get paid for playing less, who’s complaining? It was a win-win situation for all. Purists kept voicing their dissent, but who cares about those “old-men” of a bygone era? After all, they were the people who were complaining when 50 overs one day international cricket came into being. But the way one-day cricket changed the facet of the game forever, Twenty-20 promises to do just that. And with the tremendous response it has garnered , I guess the change has happened sooner than expected.

So the Twenty-20 World Cup came along. I being a cynic myself, dismissed it with a shrug, voicing a common cliché attributed to older men -”What has this world come to?”. With the way Australia has decimated their opposition in every match in recent times, nobody expected underdogs like India, with a new captain and an inexperienced team, to do anything worthwhile. But India slowly crept up the order, with some spectacular matches. Then expectations at home grew, and India and Pakistan entered the finals. Till that day, everyone just called it the “Twenty-20″ World Cup, but after that they kept referring to it as “World Cup”. Picture the transition of the image of the tournament from a juvenile sport to something infinitely more serious!! And a India-Pakistan World Cup Final doesn’t come about often. The air was abuzz with excitement, hope, aspiration, anticipation of a cricket crazy nation. And I felt like a lone tree standing in a gushing torrent of water. So I too decided to flow along with the river, since people were speaking as if it would be a crime and an utterly unpatriotic gesture not to watch the final. I did watch the final, and suddenly the passion, the excitement that had been voluntarily buried by me suddenly resurrected and poked me in the face, and I really enjoyed the match. India won the final, and the rest as they say is history…

But the objective of this writing is neither the match, nor Indian cricket. Its about the inevitability of change. Its about how we as a people have changed, and how we change our surroundings to comply with our change. Life today is very very different than what it was a decade or two back, just like life then was different from life a decade or two before that. People today are hard-pressed for time. This is the basic tenet on which a majority of the changes till today have taken place, and will take place in our lifetime. When one-day cricket was introduced, it drastically reduced the length of the game, which invariably made it more exciting. People didn’t have the time to sit through 5 days of cricket, so make them sit for a day. Now what if people don’t have time to sit through a day? Obviously, make them sit for half a day, or even less than that. Matches are more intense, more exciting, and certainly far more from boring. In one-day cricket, you scored runs initially, then consolidated your innings, and in the end, you slogged. Now you can slog from the 1^st over itself. Patience is truly a lost art in today’s world. You don’t wait for the right ball to come through. You hit whenever you feel like. Of course there’s skill and strategy required in Twenty-20 cricket too. Else you will find cricket turning into baseball. Another thing that has really come into picture in the Twenty-20 cricket matches, is that very small events can drastically change the tone and outcome of a game. There is very less room for error, and a few runs conceded here and there can mean the difference between a win and defeat. Just like in life today, where not too many mistakes are permissible by a person, and small insignificant events in one’s life can have a heavy bearing on the future of the person.

That Twenty-20 Cricket is here to stay is unquestionable. And especially with the amount of cricket being played these days, it may just turn out to be a boon for the health of players, as players have been getting themselves injured with unflinching regularity. All one hopes is that the spirit of cricket remains unaffected by this new entrant into its fraternity.

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Tags: cricket, Twenty Twenty

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