F50 is dead. Long live T20

T20 takes the boring middle overs out of One Day International cricket, and good riddance, says Sumit Chakraberty

Fifty50 has a fatal flaw: the middle overs. Those come after the powerplay overs, when the field spreads out to block boundaries even if that means conceding easy singles. The problem is the batting side too is content at that stage to pick up the singles on offer, minimising risk to keep wickets in hand for the slog at the end. So there you have a situation where both teams are in defensive mode: a perfect recipe to put you to sleep.

The ICC recognises this and has tried to jog the one-day game out of its soporific middle overs by introducing floating powerplay overs, but almost invariably captains choose to finish those off at a stretch in the beginning. So nothing has changed: we have a beginning and end where the batsmen take risks, and a boring middle where nobody is in attack mode, neither batsmen nor bowlers.

Cricket’s liposuction
Twenty20 is lean and trim, with no bulging middle, just a beginning and end. Is that any less of a game than a Fifty50 match where nothing happens in the middle overs except boring singles? Critics of T20 usually compare it unfavourably with Test cricket, but all those arguments would apply almost equally to Fifty50: that it is batsman-oriented, designed to produce fours and sixes, bowlers are reduced to a defensive role, there’s no fair contest between bat and ball…

Twenty20 is a lottery, they said before the World Cup. And yet, it turns out that the batsmen who have done well are the usual suspects. Two of the semi-finalists are the same as those in the last Fifty50 World Cup. The other two are India and Pakistan, who brought young, talented teams and deserved their success. In fact, the T20 World Cup has had fewer major upsets than the F50 where two minnows, Bangladesh and Ireland, got into the Super 8.

Glorious uncertainty
It’s probably true there’s less time to turn a match around after one team gets off to a flyer, as India did against England, or takes a bunch of early wickets, as Zimbabwe did against Australia. But the better teams will still dominate the game, as this T20 World Cup has shown. It only means the result is a little less predictable than in Fifty50, and what’s wrong with that? After all, to use an old cliché, “the glorious uncertainty of cricket” is one of its enduring charms.

One of my real concerns was whether the importance of taking wickets would be devalued with 10 wickets in hand for just 20 overs of batting. But the World Cup has shown how rapidly wickets can fall when you have to score at nine or 10 an over, or even seven or eight on a sticky wicket. In fact, the regular clatter of wickets falling has made the game more exciting to watch than a pair of batsmen keeping their wickets intact as they push the score along in singles and twos in the middle overs of a one-day match.

Ball by ball
The demise of spinners in the T20 format has been highly exaggerated too, as Daniel Vettori, Harbhajan Singh and Shahid Afridi have shown. In fact, it has been easier to use the pace of a bowler to clear the fence, as Yuvraj did six times in a row to Stuart Broad.

It does get a little numbing to see batsmen trying to thump ball after ball. But that’s also what keeps a spectator riveted because every ball is a contest, with bowlers trying to outsmart batsmen and vice versa. You may as well call it 120-120, as each ball is filled with drama. Add to that the cheerleaders, and an easily digestible three-hour duration, the same as a movie, and you have compelling entertainment. Who needs the ho-hum middle overs?