I looked forward to the Friends Provident Life T20 Final with bated breath. The annual finals day is always a big event in the English cricket calendar and sees a packed house in attendance. Mailnga charging away on Finals Day a few years back capturing the imagination of the crowd is some thing I will always remember, more so as it was a domestic cricket game.
The cricket left me dejected and in a state sad pondering. Murali Kartik opened the bowling in the final and the ball wss gripping and turning square. You would think the batsmen would look to apply themselves but what ensued was a terrible exhibition for cricket.
The batsmen kept trying to whack it and kept missing by a fair distance. When they did connect, they didn’t connect well (the probability of connecting well given the nature of the pitch was pretty low). This lead to the ridiculous statistic of the same bowler and fielder causing the dismissal of no less than four batsmen. If you weren’t watching closely enough, you would be forgiven to think that you were watching a replay of the replay, as Nasser Hussain remarked.
Now let us analyze this for a moment. The batting team probably targeted 160 if not more which would be great given a final. They ended up short at 145.
The team batting second did not learn and kept going for the same kind of shots. If they had played sensible cricket, they would have got there more times than not given a run rate of around 7.5 is not that difficult in T20 cricket.
Wisden has an interesting stat this year which shows fours and sixes win you more T20 games than 1’s and 2’s. That can explain why players want to hit through to an extent but when the situation demands, you expect first class professionals to adopt.
The problem is, in most scenarios in T20 cricket, the hit across the line works just fine. Why would you then change your approach. Given that cricketers keep playing T20 cricket, it is only natural that it will lead to bad habits in the game. Why would they care though given that T20 cricket is what pays the wages of most clubs and helps clubs financially (substantially) as it did for Leicestershire when they won the English domestic T20 competition this year.
I would like first class cricket to be subsidized for this ever expanding menace of an issue to be curbed at what is still an initial stage. You can’t blame the cricketers, who have a very small life as sports men to want to earn as much money as they can (honorably of course). Herein lies the problem of even why India ended up making the most anticipated test series in years a damp squib. Some thing needs to be done, and urgently.
