The Pro20 cricket series launched this week is being punted as ‘cricket for a new generationâ€. All hope for the future is lost.
The new generation, it seems, is unable to sit still for longer than an hour, since this is about as long as an innings lasts. It also becomes panicky when its midge-like consciousness is not stimulated by bells and whistles, so live music will perforate proceedings, adding the air of disconsolate gaiety that poorly amplified music invariably brings to sports fields.
Clearly the Pro20 series, like its predecessor in England, the popular 20/20 series, is aimed at people who know nothing about cricket. It might just as well have been cockfighting, bear-baiting or dwarf-tossing: it’s the same demographic. The marketing hoopla also insists on calling it ‘fast-forward cricketâ€, which eloquently sums up what the dissentient lowest common denominator — which includes most marketing executives — thinks about the game: that it needs fast-forwarding to get to the lively bits.
Newcomers to cricket have always failed to understand the struggle between bat and ball. Groucho Marx, watching an Ashes Test, said: ‘Say, when do they begin?†But there has always been a deficiency implied in the novice, a lack of education that needs to be remedied by sitting still and paying attention. No longer. The ignorant shall inherit the Earth.
But apart from the depressing social implications of the new game, there is the simple reality of what happens to ‘accelerated†sports. Because they are aimed at people who don’t want nuance, they are afflicted with a kind of inflation that decreases satisfaction as it raises scores. Run rates increased from three per over in the 1970s to five in the 1990s and now to 10 per over in Pro20 cricket. In a decade a hit over the ropes will count 50 and teams will score 1 000 in five overs, but it will still only satisfy once in 20 games.
The logical conclusion of what Pro20 is is a sport in which the aim is to hit waist-high full tosses into the stands, using a springier ball and a harder bat. In other words, baseball. Which is fine, as long as we acknowledge that baseball is, along with netball, one of the world’s dullest sports.
Perhaps a more useful measure of Pro20’s merit is to look at the kind of cricketers that a slogging game excludes. For starters, Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan become liabilities, since any spinner can be hit for a boundary at any time, regardless of his guile.
Likewise, all genuinely fast bowlers are a risk for a fielding captain, since the focus is on restriction rather than the dismissal of batsmen, and edges can fly for four or six off the quick men. So that rules out Brett Lee and Shoaib Akhtar.
Jonty Rhodes, who played in the English version last year, said he became redundant at backward point after the seventh over, when fielding restrictions are lifted. He was posted into the outer, and spent the rest of the game jogging left and right after balls.
The most economical and therefore successful bowler in the tournament was Andrew Hall. With all due respect to Hall and his talents, if the premier bowler in the series was a medium-pacer who rarely swings the ball, and if there was no place for the talents of Rhodes or someone like Ricky Ponting, I’d rather watch baseball. Not that one feels like watching cricket anyway at a stadium called Sahara Park.
At the time of writing a decision was still pending over exactly how Sahara Computers was going to jam its big greasy fist into our faces, but whatever the outcome, South Africa’s major cricket stadia will now have names as moronic as they are oxymoronic.
But then again, maybe the geeks at Sahara and the attention-deficit-disorder-afflicted adolescents who are running Pro20 are a match made in heaven. Both have souls that atrophied long ago. Both probably believe they have the game’s best interests at heart. Both should be tied to a cricket pitch and rearranged with a heavy roller.