My two bit on T20 and the future of world cricket...

I was listening to an evening drive time cricket show in one of the FM stations here, it was about whether T20 would contribute to the growth of cricket or will it spell doom for the game. I always thought that cricket has more become a batsman’s game, bowlers are slowly loosing their importance in the game.

In a couple of years now countries would have ceased producing world class bowlers like Kapil Dev, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner, Anil Kumble, Shane Warne, Muralidaran etc. I can’t recall the last time a 9 year old (cricket playing) kid I had met said he wanted to become a Kapil Dev or a Venkat? We are at the end of the day looking at thousands of wannabe Tendulkar’s, Dravid’s and Ponting’s. The reason cricket has become a game of the batsmen.

I agree with those commentators who fear the bowler would become an endangered species, looking at the proliferation and popularity of the more batsmen friendly formats such as the T20. If you are a bowler, you would be clobbered all round the park. I am sure any kid would agree with me in saying you better clobber than the clobbered (Chris & Stuart Broad would agree the most). So what is the solution? Here, my two bit…

The new format I propose would be called “Mech 20”.

1. Here you have the batsmen on one side and the bowling machine developers on the other side.

2. The developers would innovate in terms of the pace at which their machines would hurl the ball, spin, swing, reverse swing and so on.

3. The batsmen would simply stand in the other end and clobber and of course run.

4. The rest of the field wouldn’t be touched. You would still have 11 men on the field doing the fielding drills and trying to catch, save runs or run the batsmen out.

For example the Indian cricket team of this format would comprise of the 11 batsmen, who would also field and feed the ball to the machine. And a couple of developers, who would develop, innovate on this machine and improve it to beat the opposition batsmen.

For those who would ask how technologically advanced, say a Namibia can get. Here is the solution… Now you don’t need to hire a coach for those obscene salaries, you simply hire your developer.

I personally think “Mech 20” could well be the future of cricket, the batsmen’s game.

(For those who heard the show in Dubai… You might remember that a certain Mr. B had sketched this format out through his SMS to the show. If you want to know more about the Mr B, click here…)

I got the picture for this post from here