I have hardly been watching cricket for the last two weeks. The blame lies, in part, to the overkill of T20 with the IPL and the ICC World T20 over the last ten weeks. So, the India-West India ODI series was a little bit of a washout for me. And I am not referring to the rains and thunderstorms that the players had to brave!

I have been reading a little bit about cricket, though. I had time to read the Colin Cowdrey Memorial Lecture delivered by the former Aussie wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist late last month. Gilchrist tried to get the attention of administrators towards some of the key issues that the cricket world is faced with.

For those uninitiated with cricket history, Colin Cowdrey was a former English captain, the first in history to play 100 Test matches and ended his cricket career in the mid 1970s. He was known as a gritty batsman who later went on to become a successful thinker for the game, who helped modernise the game. Read more…

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I recently read an article from Aravind Panchal in “Inbox” observing that in Twenty20 cricket, there are no definite favourites. I do not think that anybody can argue against it. But what I want to contend is the proposition that the chance of not having favourites or champions is good for the game. I am not quite so sure.

Surprises as good as long as they remain only as surprises. But more than this simple fact of life, there is one thing about Sports - that unless the game do not consistently reward quality, the game itself cannot compete with other games who nurture quality, over a long period of time. The reason why we celebrate the failure of Australia is: they have a set of players who are proven champions in “OTHER” forms of cricket.

For the time being let us assume that cricket as a game is played only in the Twenty20 version and that there is no Test cricket or ODI (which is very much possible going by Chris Gayle’s words). Even though it is too early to judge, the predictable patterns emerging from the world of Twenty20 is that there are no champion cricketers in Twenty20. Every tournament, every match has its own heroes. Read more…

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