Twenty-20 Foresight

As every other inactive Indian blogger, this moment would serve as an opportunity to get over the blogger's block, and I too, am making the best of this opportunity.

However, this post would be different (I hope) from the countless other posts that might get into the nitty-gritties of the Twenty20 tournament, the Final match tonight or Indian team's performance, or probably even how each team performed throughout the series.

This post is rather about my thoughts as a bystander to this exciting event.

Similar to what happened when the One Day International format was introduced, this format too faced the initial criticism from the purists. But at the end, as many articles and blogs have said, everybody is happy with this format. And almost everybody's sure that this would add to, and not replace, the other formats.

In hindsight, the reasons for these seem quite obvious. We were trying to measure the advantages and disadvantages of the Twenty20 format with our understanding and experience of the ODI and Test Match formats. The reactions, hence, were:
- It would be crunching it too much for it to remain interesting
- It would simply become a slog-fest, and the resultant runs would be so much, it would be very frustrating for the bowlers.

Overall, while some of the disadvantages are true, the format has its advantages too:
- It is long enough to keep things exciting, but short enough to hold everyone interested throughout the match.
- While compared to the other formats, the batsmen's strike rates would be higher and bowlers economy rates would be lower, the T20 records would simply get their own life, just the way ODI scores are no more compared to Test scores.
- As more of this format is played, the strategising would evolve and we would have similar analyses and planning in the matches and series, the way we currently have going in the Test and ODI.

But my gut feel is that the game would still be plagued by the current vices. There is enough money and not enough emotions riding International cricket (when compared to Football) to boot out the bookies.

I can only hope that the game comes out clean soon.