Regardless of which team wins the ICC World Twenty20 this weekend, the tournament has undoubtedly been a great success, with its exciting brand of cricket, huge global television audiences and grounds packed with fans of all nationalities, ages and genders, clearly having fun – except, of course, when their team is on the losing end.
In Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean, T20 also seems to have revived interest in the fortunes of the West Indies team, who have been almost unrecognisable from the cold, sullen rabble, who had masqueraded as West Indian cricketers in the preceding Test and one-day series against England. Perhaps the team has unwittingly been reflecting their captain’s stated preference for T20 over the traditional game and the widespread suspicion that this generation of West Indian cricketers can only maintain attention and intensity over short periods.
T20 is a more compressed version of limited overs cricket, and it is as close to Test cricket as rum punch made with white rum is to 15-year old rum. As Mr Spock might have said to Captain Kirk, had the Starship Enterprise landed at Lord’s during the tournament, “It’s cricket, Captain, but not as we know it.” T20 reflects modernization and changes in popular taste; it is most definitely not for the purists.
But T20 undoubtedly packs a punch and its appeal to those who prefer their entertainment packaged into a few hours of non-stop action, sporting showbiz and bling cannot be denied.
Those with sepia-tinged memories of cricket and its glories, however, may never quite come to terms with the game’s latest incarnation. Those privileged to have seen the greats of West Indies and world cricket may grumble that T20 is an aberration, all adrenaline and power hitting, with no finesse or lasting aesthetic appeal.
Those few of us remaining who can recall the original Atlas of West Indies batting, George Headley, and many who have seen his latter-day heirs, the incomparable Brian Lara and the almost immoveable object also known as Shivnarine Chanderpaul, may never really have time for the flash-in-the-pan pyrotechnics of Shahid Afridi or Yuvraj Singh, exciting as they can be, albeit in a blur of action soon overtaken by the next brilliant, but ultimately forgettable eruption of slogging.
Those of us who have delighted in the sublime late cuts and elegance of stroke of Frank Worrell, the sheer, breathtaking, all-round genius of Gary Sobers, the extravagant artistry of Rohan Kanhai, the cultured power of Clyde Walcott, Clive Lloyd and Gordon Greenidge, and the indomitable force that was Vivian Richards, will have little time for the ungainly hoicks, paddle sweeps and shovel scoops, made popular by T20, audacious and innovative though they may be.
In the modern cricketing lexicon, we hear more talk of batters and hitters, rather than batsmen, perhaps reflecting the underlying sense that the art of batsmanship in the shorter forms of the game would appear to be a fading glory, with touch regarded almost as an unnecessary eccentricity, much as rhyme and metre appear to be superfluous to poetry nowadays. But don’t tell that to Ramnaresh Sarwan and Mahela Jayawardene.
T20 is to cricket what Twitter is to modern communication. It is to the point, almost brutally so, shorn of all subtlety of expression and artistic adornment. It is, ultimately, cricket dumbed down for a fast-paced world and the quest for instant gratification.
But T20 is undeniably entertaining, even if it does not fully test all the mental, physical and technical skills of cricketers over the prolonged, character-searching trial that is the 5-day Test match. But the shortest form of the game is the most unforgiving in that the slightest error can mean the difference between victory and defeat. And T20 is transforming the least glamorous of cricket’s disciplines, fielding, and is bringing much needed innovation to boost the game’s popularity around the world.
To survive, Test cricket will have to change. The sensible use of technology should bring improvements. There is already talk of day-night Test matches, which will surely mean coloured clothing, white balls and the razzmatazz of one-day cricket and T20. The purists had better brace themselves.
But at Test matches in the Caribbean, we already have music and dancing girls, party stands and artificial beaches. In fact, we have always been in the forefront of bringing entertainment to the spectators and allowing the spectators to bring entertainment to the grounds, except of course, when we allowed ourselves to be emasculated by the ICC during the 2007 Cricket World Cup. Perhaps it is the choice of music and the silly dancing boys and girls in England that are too cringe-making for West Indian tastes.
In the meantime, the West Indies cricket team has to regain the art and joy of playing competitive cricket over five days, if we are to dispel the spreading notion that, as a people, all we love is a party and do not have the discipline to apply ourselves to bigger challenges.
Sic transit gloria mundi – Thus passes the glory of the world. The world changes and cricket mirrors those changes. Or is it the other way around?
