There is, of course, a new fangled form of God's Own Game known as Twenty20. In recent days it has been hailed as the saviour of world cricket in the media. This is mainly because it can take as little as 2-3 hours to play a match instead of 5 days, you can put cheerleaders in the breaks and it doesn't tax the attention span of today's discerning sport fan.
Now I like cheerleaders as much as the next man (or woman - 9/10ths full of penguins is an open-minded blog), however, I have got a bit of a problem with the branding of Twenty20. Its pitched as this high tempo excitement-fest of action with a side helping of power-hitting. I have seen a number of Twenty20 games of the last couple of years and aside from one or two notable exceptions they have been hugely dull affairs.
Take for example the recent game between Kent Spitfires and the Sussex Something or Others, who played out an entirely forgettable match. The problem is that the batting side need to accumulate large amounts of runs very quickly, while the bowling side needs to curtail those runs. This should lead to scintillating strokeplay and aggressive bowling. However, captains will often bowl average spinners and seamers chucking down medium pace dibbly-dobblers because slower bowling is harder to hit to the boundaries. This means that for much of the time you are watching boring medium pacers being hit for 4 or 5 singles every over.
Hmmmmm. Not thrilling in any way. But at least there are cheerleaders.......
Maybe there is something to this Twenty20 lark after all.....
