Are you Twenty20 Cricket Crazy?

NOTHING succeeds like success, says the proverb. For confirmation, look no further than the cricket grounds of South Africa. Test matches there usually struggle to attract a quorum. For the past 10 days the grounds have brimmed with life and noise for a world championship of the game's newest variant, Twenty20: a heady mixture of thrills, spills and the epiphenomenon of mass marketing.

The conclusion, moreover, was close to ideal.India Vs Pakistan It couldn't have been bigger ! Where the 50-over-a-side World Cup earlier this year was fatally undermined by the early exit of India ,resulting in anger in Indian cricket lovers.But twenty20 brought the smiles back on cricket lovers faces and Yuvraj Singh's Six sixes made it bigger.
In the excitement, Australians have been notable party poppers, and not merely because they went down to both finalists after being tripped up by Zimbabwe. Trying to sound enthused about the crowds in Johannesburg, Adam Gilchrist let his ambivalence hang out: "Er, yeah, yeah. It's um ... well. The more I play it, I am starting to, not so much like it as a player, but love watching it."

Andrew Symonds came straight out and called Twenty20 "a frustrating game because you can be beaten by the lesser sides", which "have to be good for a shorter period of time". In this they echo their captain, Ricky Ponting, who last year confessed: "I don't think I really like playing Twenty20 international cricket."

Twenty20 has been a blast: a star burst of sixes, a welter of wickets and, not least, a farcical "bowl-out" during the finalists' first meeting where trembling players proved embarrassingly incapable of hitting a set of stumps.It tests your nerves ,twists and turns can't let your eyes away from television


Testmatche is a game of ancients, ODI game of past and 20twenty game of this generation .
"In cricket, the players are the boss,In twenty20 cricket, the game is the boss."
Indeed, the format originated on the marketing whiteboards at the England and Wales Cricket Board four years ago as a means of attracting cricket "tolerators": sports watchers averse to the game who might consider going if it was shorter, sharper and noisier.

A novel idea, this: to redesign a game to the specifications of those who don't like it, rather like creating art for consumers who prefer pornography or composing music for listeners with a taste for cacophony.

But the practitioners' acquiescence is bought by an arrangement reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's principle for dealing with actors: "Pay them heaps and treat them like cattle."

So the administrators have a hit on their hands, a hit that will reverberate. We have already seen the best-case scenario: a successful tournament still tinged with novelty.

Through time, however, it is likely that the main beneficiaries will be commercial intermediaries.

Cricket will make a great deal of money in the short term, money it has no obvious need for and will mostly waste, and it will be left a coarser, crueler, crasser game as a result. Now that the Twenty20 world championship is over, another proverb comes to mind: be careful what you wish for.