Cricket - A step towards its grave

A lot of people, once when the dust settles down on the match that was played between South Africa and Australia at the Wanderers, will refer to the match and say this was the day when cricket took its first steps towards its grave. And I say this, even when everyone else is saying that cricket has witnessed the greatest game of all times. I disagree! No way was this the greatest game of one-day cricket (let's just limit ourselves to one-day cricket). Not by a long distance.

I was having a great conversation with one of my managers recently (incidentally, he is a great thinker in general, he does not follow the game with the kind of passion that I do, but provides great insight into the game we all love) about what constitutes a good game of cricket and how 20-20 is just going to ruin the game, and it was refreshing to know that not all people appreciate the fact that cricket has become so batsmen dominated these days and a “good” game of one-day cricket constitutes each side hitting 300 plus runs scores. It is not a coincidence that there are very few "good" bowlers in the game today. What happened at Johannesburg should be an eye opener to the administrators of the game. It should tell them that, if we don't wake up to the facts now, in the next few years (I am hoping it will be decades) we will not have bowlers, rather just bowling machines and cricket matches will be reduced to what Steve Waugh describes as "batathons" where each team will pack 11 batsmen and just try and hit as many runs as they can conjour up in 300 legal deliveries.

The point that I am trying to make is cricket for the most part of the last century (and for all the centuries before the last one) was meant to be a "contest" between bat and ball. With the advent of one-day cricket, somehow people running the game got the notion that crowds no longer come to see batsmen get out or bowlers bowling great and mean spells (like what Joel Garner used to even in the one-day format), much rather, they come to see bowlers being hammered to all parts of the grounds, fours and sixes are what the crowds enjoy. That has led to groundsmen all over the world prepare dead-pans in terms of wickets, administrators modifying the laws of the game such that batsmen, always the pampered lot anyways, were being pampered even more, grounds being smaller than their actual size for a one-day game (the same ground will retain its normal size for test matches though).

Groundsmen today consider a wicket that produces 600 runs in 100 overs to be the ideal one-day cricket wicket. That is nonsense. Since when did cricket cease to be a contest between the bat and the ball? If anything, the best one-day games have been the low scoring matches, when one of the sides has to grind it out to score a decent total and then the opposition has to do much of the same to chase it down. The definition of a good cricket wicket should not change regardless of the form of cricket being played - it should assist both batsmen as well as bowlers.

This article is in no way meant to demean one-day cricket (although I will continue to hate 20-20 cricket), rather figure out what can be done to make cricket more of a contest even in the shorter form of the game. True, it is not meant for the connoisseur, but it is still cricket, and again as with the definition of a good wicket, the definition of cricket should not change with the form of the game that is being played. In short – it is an even contest between the bat and the ball.

So what can be done to move away from teams getting 400 runs in one-day cricket and in the process killing all the bowlers and bowling in general? Well, to begin with, the administrators of the game need to sit down and think about how to limit the advantages that batsmen enjoy. The first and the most obvious thing that comes to mind is, remove the bouncer law from the one-day game, in fact remove it from the game all together. Why should bowlers be limited to bowling just one bouncer (or 2 in case of Test match cricket) per over? Are batsmen limited to scoring just one boundary per over? The reason why the administrators had introduced the bouncer limit was, because they had felt that, a bouncer was very intimidating for the batsmen, and they were not able to score off it. Bowlers, do tend to resort to un-sportsmen like behavior when it comes to bouncers, however, it should be up to the umpires and the match referees to adjudicate whether a bouncer was a foul bouncer or not.

Another thing that needs to be thought about is – how to make better use of the wicket - (this has already been thought in the committee that Sunil Gavaskar has been leading). One way is to break down an innings into two sections, much like what happens in a test match, however, in a more controlled manner than what happens in a test match. For example, assuming that we have a fresh wicket for about 25 to 30 overs, each team will bat on the wicket for 10 to 15 overs, followed by the opposition batting on it for the same number of overs and then repeat the process for the remaining 35-40 overs. If that is not allowable, then we need to revert back to using two balls per innings, in effect using it for just 25 overs. Of course, much of the advantage then lies with faster bowlers, and some may argue what about the Shane Warnes and Kumbles of the world? I believe we need to take the following view on that – I believe it is an opportunity for the spinners to evolve and start to bowl with a newer and harder ball. I think the best spinners in the world don’t mind bowling with a harder ball, in fact, most love doing so.

Again, these are just a couple of solutions that decision makers in the game need to think about. There are plenty of things that can be done and some are being done – powerplays and so on. It should always be remembered that cricket is a contest and a contest is only enjoyable when it is fair between the contestants – in this case, the bat and the ball.