Rohit Mahajan
The old cliché ‘glorious uncertainties of cricket’ seems so grossly inadequate for our times — it was coined in the heyday of Test cricket, after all. Imagine, if the writers of old thought Test cricket was ‘gloriously uncertain’, how would have they described the manic unpredictability of T20 cricket?
T20 cricket is victory of forgetting over memory for one plain reason — it produces such a glut of memorable moments, in merely three hours, that nothing extraordinary stands out. The proliferation of T20 leagues has turned six-hitting into a commonplace, round-the-year occurrence.
Javed Miandad’s last-ball six off Chetan Sharma in 1986 is burnt into the memory of those who watched it in Sharjah or on TV at home. But, from just last year, do you remember how Pakistan lost the T20 World Cup semifinals? The three amazing sixers by Matthew Wade — a batsman far inferior to Miandad — against Shaheen Afridi, a bowler far superior to Chetan Sharma? Remember?
Old-timers remember the dashing Salim Durani hitting sixers on demand — in Test matches! Yet, his record shows that he hit only 15 sixers in 50 Test innings over 13 years. Hitting a six was an event in that time, when the boundaries were farther and the bats smaller, lighter. The grounds now are smaller, the boundaries closer — and the bats are monstrous.
Chris Gayle hit 18 sixers during a Bangladesh Premier League match in 2017 — 18 sixers in 90 minutes, three more than Durani hit in his entire career! Afghanistan’s Hazratullah Zazai holds the international record for six-hitting, with 16 against Ireland in 2019; for a ‘big’ team, the record is 14, by Andrew Finch against England in 2015. But the banality of such amazingness has made it forgettable, into just another instance of manic hitting.
Zeitgeist
Perhaps unkindly, a research paper in 2011 referred to the rise of T20 cricket with an eye-catching title: ‘Cricket for people who don’t like cricket?: Twenty20 as expression of the cultural and media zeitgeist’.
In our times, when people have too much to do and too little time to do it, Test cricket does seem anachronistic. T20 cricket is also the revenge of the less-talented against the super-talented — when the game is abbreviated, players with modest abilities have a chance, just as a dullard in math can get the same marks as the genius if the examination has easy questions. It’s due to this reason that, say, the now-anonymous Paul Valthaty was able to outshine some of the biggest names in the 2011 IPL.
It works the same way for teams — brevity of play bridges the gulf between skills. West Indies, the most successful team in the history of T20 World Cup, with two crowns, have been knocked out of this year’s tournament after losing to Scotland and Ireland. Sri Lanka, the Asia Cup champions, lost to Namibia. Six different teams have won the title in the seven editions of the T20 World Cup so far, and any of the top nine teams can win it this time around. Brevity turns T20 into a lottery — well, almost.
When great cricketers and commentators get too excited by T20 cricket, one suspects they want to hype it up, for that’s what they’re paid to do. In 2010, Yusuf Pathan struck a 37-ball century in the IPL. Shane Warne, Pathan’s captain, said: “I’ve played cricket for 21 years and I have seen Sachin Tendulkar as the best batsman against whom I have played as he has murdered attacks and hit them all over the park. But today was the best innings I have ever seen.” Well! Pathan’s innings is now nothing more than trivia.
The mantra for T20 is ‘watch it, enjoy it, forget it’ — but never rate a team or player too high or too low on the basis of this format. Let the tamasha begin!
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