It took Kevin Pietersen, of all people, to articulate the edgy appeal of the Twenty20 World Championship. ”Twenty20 is totally different from one-day cricket, where you can plan your innings and do so many things in your preparation to make sure the procedures you want to happen out in the middle do happen,” he said this week.
As he spoke, Pietersen had the look of a black person about to ring Eugene Terre’Blanche’s doorbell, circa 1995. His Adam’s apple seemed to have to traverse a barbed-wire fence as it bobbed awkwardly in his clammy throat, his eyes were fixed straight ahead like a pair of shotgun barrels and there was a squeaky, scratchy noise where his voice might have been.
”Twenty20 is a lottery. You’ve seen how Bangladesh played against the West Indies and then how they played against South Africa: six, out, six, out. But it’s a fascinating game and I’m not too sure you can prepare yourself for it 100% because anything can happen in those 20 overs.”
By the next day, Pietersen’s moment of mental clarity had faded. He tried to play the reverse sweep — cricket’s equivalent of dancing the funky chicken in the middle of North Korea’s May Day parade — to Daniel Vettori and was duly bowled.
Two days earlier in Cape Town, Pietersen had tried to moer his way straight through Shaun Pollock in an attempt to take a single. The ersatz Englishman ended up on his arse, sans bat, and run out.
The theory that Pietersen needs a kitbag big enough to be able to park his trailer next to his ego only gained currency in the process. But between those two moments of burlesque he made perfect sense.
”I think Twenty20 is hit-and-miss big-time. On any given day you’re going to get a bloke who can destroy you. [Zimbabwe’s] Brendan Taylor beat Australia; [Bangladesh’s] Mohammad Ashraful sent the West Indies home. I don’t think you can say you can definitely beat any opposition.
”You can lose three, four, five overs in one-day cricket and clutch it back. You lose any time here — with a few nicks, fours, sixes, dropped catches — and you’re gone.”
When England took the field against India in Durban on Wednesday, they were indeed gone. Or, in Pietersen’s phrase, ”off-ski”. Their fate was sealed shortly before, when South Africa beat New Zealand in the first match of the Kingsmead doubleheader. That meant England had no chance of reaching the semifinals.
England’s South African bowling coach, Allan Donald; their Zimbabwean batting coach, Andy Flower; and, yes, Maritzburg-born, Durban-raised Pietersen deserved better.
Not forgetting injured wicketkeeper Matt Prior, who was born in Johannesburg; Vikram Solanki, a native of India who stood in for Prior behind the stumps; and Owais Shah, once a Pakistani. As fine young sons of Chandigarh and Nottingham respectively, Yuvraj Singh and Stuart Broad come with no such complications.
Yuvraj’s approach to Broad’s bowling in the 19th over of India’s innings was even simpler: hit it. Hard. As each of Broad’s deliveries was sent screaming over various parts of the boundary to make Yuvraj just the fourth player to hit six sixes in an over, his captain, quintessential man-of-middle-England Paul Collingwood, had mixed feelings.
”It was an unbelievable game to have an over like that from Yuvraj; it’s the best striking I’ve ever seen,” Collingwood said. ”I feel a bit sorry for Stuart, but in this Twenty20 format it was a matter of time before we were going to get an over like that. He’s never going to get rid of that, unfortunately, and I think he realises that. He’s a very proud man, and that will hurt him.”
Even Yuvraj had sympathy, however fleeting, for Broad. ”I got hit for five sixes in an over by Dimitri Mascarenhas in the sixth ODI at the Oval [two weeks ago],” he said. ”It’s a horrible feeling. I had so many phone calls — and nobody calls me when I make a century. I had 100, 150 calls from people making fun of me. I was like, ‘God, this is not right, you’ve got to give it back to me.’ I guess he gave it to me today.”
Monday’s final in Johannesburg looms like a neon-painted Voortrekker Monument in the middle distance. Can this tournament get bigger, brighter, better? Bet your arse it can.