What now after IPL? – Part 1 (The Virtues of T20)

I feel like I have to add my obligatory two-cents to the post-IPL analysis bandwagon, albeit belatedly. There is little doubt that by most metrics IPL was a success, regardless of the fact that many games were not competitive, or decided well in advance of the final ball being bowled. There is even less doubt that IPL is here to stay, and that it will lead to the mushrooming of other leagues that try and imitate its success. I think the stakes are high for the future of the game as we know it, and so it is well worth taking stock. This will be a two-part post. In this post, I will argue that the T20 format is a winner, which puts the question of the relevance of ODIs, rather than Tests, front-and-center. In my next post (which will take me some days to write, but it will show up eventually), I will suggest that the real worry is not about the format itself, but about the way in which the format will be milked by the powers-that-be (and here my big worry again is not about the death of Test cricket, but about the death of the domestic game, which will have seriously adverse consequences for cricket as a sport regardless of format); and that what is needed is some far-sighted, visionary leadership, one that seeks to use the T20 format not to fill coffers and score political points, but to genuinely develop the game in places where it needs developing (wishful thinking, of course, but no harm in pleading for it).

The Joys of the Format

First of all, like a number of other people, I do not believe the T20s will directly threaten the future of Test cricket, though it could certainly have indirect repercussions. These same gloomy scenarios were trotted out in the 1980s, when one-day cricket was grabbing hold of the cricketing world’s consciousness following India’s World Cup win. The fact of the matter is that the Test cricket afficianado is going nowhere; and most players across the world see playing Test cricket as still the ultimate goal and test of their abilities as cricketers. Someone like Yuvraj Singh has already achieved more than most people would dream of in his one-day career; yet he yearns for a permanent Test spot. We all know that Michael Bevan was arguably the greatest one-day batsman of the last two decades; yet when we make a list of the all-time great batsmen, Bevan’s name is likely not even going to cross our minds. Indeed, he probably wouldn’t even make a post-1980s Australian XI. One-day cricket certainly changed Test cricket, mostly for the better. The dull, drab draws of the 1980s have been replaced by teams scoring in excess of 350 a day. There is better fitness, better fielding, better running in between wickets. Test cricket is too beautiful and resilient a game to go away just because something snazzier with a wider consumer appeal is brought in. Rather, it will adapt.

But the debate about whether ODIs will adapt has been well and truly joined. On cricinfo, Dileep Premachandran has suggested that the future of ODIs might be in jeopardy; Osman Samiuddin has suggested that would be tragic. Frankly, I would say good riddance, and thoroughly disagree with Osman’s nostalgia for something that has hardly started going away. My first point / wish / argument therefore is this –

Do away with the one-day game.

One-day games have had their place in the historical development of the game. But too often now they are boring, redundant and meaningless. Really, who cares or is likely to remember who won this tri-series in Bangladesh? What on earth is a performance for India against Hong Kong in the forthcoming Asia Cup likely to be worth, compared to a performance for Chennai against the likes of Warne, Tanvir and Watson? Who even remembers what happened in the more “consequential” series between big teams? Does it even matter that England beat India 4-3 in the one-day series last year, or do all of you, like me, just recall that we won in England, since the Test series was ours? Would even a loss in the finals of the CB Series in Australia have dulled the thrill of having held the Aussies to a draw in a Test series away from home for the second time running?

One problem with so many one-day games, of course, is the crammed cricket calendar, which is only going to get more full with the temptation to pack in T20 games within series, and with the proliferation of franchise-based T20 leagues. So one possibility would be to reduce the number of one-day games, to strike a “balance” with T20. But that wouldn’t be a solution – it would just make one-dayers even more redundant. A seven-match one-day series with England is unimportant enough. A three-match one-day series against England would just be redundant and utterly trivial.

As Premachandran points out, the only reason to keep the one-day game alive is because of the special importance that has been accorded to the World Cup. And so, for that quadrennial extravaganza to retain its meaning and importance, we have four years of farcical, largely inconsequential encounters, which are more occasions for backroom politics in the guise of “encouraging youngsters”, “building for the future” etc than they are for cricket that will stick in the memory. But do we really still need the World Cup? The 2007 version was a poorly managed, utterly bloated affair; the 2003 was in reality no less so, though for Indian fans that was made up for by the team’s dream run to the finals.

The World Cup has become a meaningless affair in part because of the ICC’s insistence on packing it with meaningless teams such as Bermuda or Canada in the guise of “globalizing” the game – a pointless form of globalization, because very little grassroots development of the game actually happens in these countries in the intervening four years, so that each time they show up as lambs to the slaughter. But in part, the tedium of the World Cup is because of Australia’s continued dominance of the game, a dominance that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future in spite of the generational changing of the guard there. In a sense, the World Cup was invigorated for the 1980s and 1990s by India’s 1983 win. It seemed at the time like an upset, perhaps even a fluke, but it marked the end of the domination of world cricket by the West Indies, and a period of 15 years or so where any number of teams could stake their claims to being the best in the one-day game. India, Pakistan, Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka and New Zealand all had their moments of glory, and the West Indies, while no longer the force that they had been, were always a threat with the likes of Richardson and Richards, Ambrose and Walsh, still striking fear into the opposition. Now it is Australia v the Rest, and the West Indies have disappeared without a trace even from the category of the Rest, sliding rapidly towards the category of the Has-Beens. Three consecutive World Cups have been decided by lop-sided finals where teams that were supposed to be realistic challengers to Aussie dominance have been wiped off the floor.

Of course, this Australian dominance exists in other forms of the game as well. But Test series allow the elaboration and probing of Aussie weaknesses over time, so that really good teams can stand up to them and put in utterly memorable performances – as England did in the 2005 Ashes with superb fast swing bowling, and as India have done in 2001, 2004 and this winter. In other words, Australia’s domination of the Test scene has provided the conditions of possibility for some of the classic cricketing encounters in any form of the game, ever. Australia will also no doubt learn to dominate the T20 format, and the success of Aussies in the IPL already shows how they have adapted more quickly to it than most others. But T20 is such a quick game that there is little time to recover from slips, and that makes the Aussies more vulnerable in this format than in the 50-over format. The Aussies indeed are not immune to slips – there are any number of occasions when their top order especially has failed, and they have been bailed out by the likes of Bevan (in one-dayers) and Gilchrist (in Tests) batting at 6 or 7. Indeed, even their utterly formidable 2003 World Cup campaign started out with their batting in great strife against Pakistan, before Andrew Symonds announced his arrival on the world scene with that remarkable 145 made at no. 6. Such rearguards are much harder in T20 – one of its drawbacks as a format – but it also levels the playing field with the Aussies, because it means that if you can push them on the back foot early, then any opposition is in with a chance – as even Zimbabwe showed at the T20 World Cup.

In other words, if we can get over our World Cup fetish – and it is a fetish, and one that has been nurtured in large part by the Indian cricket media and fans – we’ll see that behind it, the one-day emperor really has no clothes. But my argument for the superiority of T20 over the one-day game is not just because of the redundancy of the latter – it is also because of the merits of the former.

The basic problem with the one-day game is that it is designed to favor attacking batsmen and defensive bowlers. This does not mean that batsmen have to slog – there is time for genuine, technically correct batsmen to build innings, and for batsmen who can pick the gaps and are quick between the wickets to thrive. And it does not mean that attacking bowlers don’t have their place in this format. The likes of Shane Warne, Shane Bond and the young erratic Brett Lee have all thrived. But it does mean that there is a premium on having at least three or four (sometimes five) bowlers who are trundlers, who can put the ball on a spot and keep things tight without having exceptional talent.

This has had a few consequences. The first is that some genuinely mediocre cricketers – especially bowlers – have donned their national colors. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in England, which is the one team to have never achieved serious one-day domination of the international stage in spite of playing more one-day cricket than anyone else in their domestic competitions. England spawned a generation of bits-and-pieces players, “all-rounders” who would not have managed their place in the side on the basis of either their batting or bowling alone – the likes of David Capel, Adam Hollioake, Dermot Reeve, Mark Ealham. Even Pakistan have taken to producing tight, restrictive fast bowlers, more in the image of an Aqib Javed than a Wasim Akram or Waqar Younis.

But the really adverse consequence has been the death of quality spin bowling. This death has been masked by the fact that the last 15 years have seen three of the greatest exponents of the art in Warne, Murali and Kumble thriving. But there has been a huge gulf between those three and the rest, and against the success of these three, one should also consider the demise of two other artists, Saqlain Mushtaq and Harbhajan Singh. Both of these were outstanding, attacking bowlers who turned into flat defensive ones because of one-day cricket. This led to the end of Saqlain’s career; Bhajji’s continues really only because he is the selectors’ favorite, and not really on the back of any strong performances. Indeed, Ramesh Powar is a far better practitioner of the craft – he relies on loop, guile, flight, subtle changes of pace, rather in the manner of Erapalli Prasanna – but Bhajji’s flatter more predictable line and his ability to extract bounce of the pitch is seen as a greater asset in the one-day game, in spite of the fact that Powar was one of the stars of the one-day series in England last summer. Indeed, it is quite likely that someone like Prasanna would never have been a fixture in the Indian team had there been quite such a premium on one-day cricket in the 1960s and 70s.

T20 changes that. One of the constantly trotted out misreadings of this format is that it will further encourage slogging and defensive bowling. This has in fact not been borne out as true, either in the T20 World Cup or in the IPL. This is for a fundamental reason – the value of a wicket in T20 is worth far more than the value of a wicket in the 50-over format. A wicket in any format means a couple of overs worth of consolidation. That is par for the course in 50/50, but can be devastating in T20. So in fact, T20 puts enormous pressure on a new batsman, who is caught between having to accelerate immediately to keep up the necessary momentum, thereby risking another wicket, or taking a few balls to get in, thereby affecting the run rate in potentially serious ways.

There are three consequences to this, all of them good. The first is that it really tests the skill and planning abilities of especially middle order batsmen in a way that one-day cricket doesn’t. A perfect middle order batsman in one-day cricket is someone who can push the ball around without getting out, run singles hard, score 4 or 5 runs an over, take advantage of a loose delivery, and then accelerate in the slog, usually when well set. The typical profile of such a one-day batsman is someone like Dravid or Jacques Kallis. Indeed, if a team loses its 3rd wicket in the 42nd over, it is not usual for the typical middle order batsman to be sent in – you’d much more likely see a Dhoni or Klusener walk in to such a situation than a Dravid or Kallis, because if a Dhoni or Klusener gets out in the 44th over it’s not such a big deal. But if a team loses its 2nd wicket in the 12th over of a T20 game, then 8 overs left is nearly half the innings; another wicket in the 13th over could be a disaster; and the choice of whether to send someone like a Dravid or a Dhoni in becomes a crucial tactical decision, the sort of decision that could decide a game’s outcome. For a batsman as well, walking in to such a situation requires immense planning and skill – does he take a few balls to get set? Does he go for broke? Is he actually good enough to get a move on from the first delivery without taking risks? These present real tests of technical batsmanship; the successful solution has never been a slog.
The reason that Bangalore did so poorly in the IPL, therefore, is not that their line-up was packed with Test stars like Dravid and Kallis; it was because it was packed with one-day stars like Dravid and Kallis. All those who parrot the fact that Dravid and Kallis are Test specialists forget the fact that these are amongst two of the most successful one-day players in the world, and this is success that has been developed and showcased over the better part of the decade. They didn’t fail because they don’t know how to slog; they failed because Bangalore failed to decide on a stable opening partnership, which is the most important thing to have settled in a T20 line-up; therefore lost too many early wickets too soon too often; and the likes of Dravid and Kallis just couldn’t figure out their strategy in responding to that situation. For that matter, neither could Misbah-ul-Haq (cushioned while playing for Pakistan by the strong top-order performances of people like Salman Butt), or Cameron White, or Mark Boucher. (Indeed, Dravid figured out this format better than any of these others). In contrast, someone like Rohit Sharma was so impressive because he was almost instinctively able to respond to these situations, batting with equal effectiveness and élan when he walked into a sticky situation as when he walked in on the back of the (rare) strong start. This is not because Rohit is a better slogger than Dravid – he is a remarkably tight technical player, plays percentage shots, and often plays along the ground. It is because he is a better T20 player, which requires certain specific skills that are not about slogging, but about quality batsmanship under pressure and with little time to settle.

The second consequence is that is really places a premium on partnerships. Of course, partnerships are important in all forms of the game. But one of the ways in which a new batsman can be given a cushion in this format is if his partner is able to adjust his tempo to allow that cushion. That is a real skill, and the one person who really mastered it in the IPL was Graeme Smith. He was masterful in holding one end up and rotating the strike while batting with an Asnodkar or a Yusuf Pathan (therefore allowing these youngsters to play their natural game, which in Asnodkar’s case at least was often low percentage and high risk), and seamlessly shifting up a gear when someone like Shane Watson or Mohammad Kaif came in, allowing the latter the luxury to get their eye in without affecting the team’s run rate. This is why I think that Smith was undoubtedly one of the most valuable players of the tournament, even if he didn’t make as many runs as a Shaun Marsh or a Gautam Gambhir.

The third consequence of the importance of wickets is that it allows spinners to express themselves. Even in the T20 World Cup in South Africa, which was played on wickets most conducive to seam bowling (allowing the likes of Umar Gul, Stuart Clarke and R.P. Singh to thrive), the likes of Shahid Afridi and Daniel Vettori made a big impact. However, that’s not such a surprise – both these bowlers have already made their marks in the one-day game. For me, the real eye-opener of the IPL, especially as the tournament progressed and wickets got slower, was the performance of the leg-spinners. That Warne was a success was no surprise; but the success of bowlers like Piyush Chawla and Amit Mishra really needs taking note of, because there’s something serious to be learnt from it.

Yes, Chawla and Mishra are good bowlers. Chawla has been knocking on doors for a couple of years now, while Mishra picked up more wickets than any other spinner in the domestic charts this year. But how did both register their success? By picking up wickets. Yuvraj said that Chawla was his go-to man whenever Punjab was in strife with the ball. That’s not because Chawla bowled tightly and restrictively. It was because he tossed the ball up, varied it around, got hit, but invariably broke through. That the man who was hit for more sixes than anyone else in the tournament should be hailed as his team’s “go-to man” in a nutshell sums up the virtues of T20. Mishra too would get tonked occasionally, and therein lay his value – for every shot that sailed over the ropes, there was a good chance that another would be caught by a fielder in the deep; or, given the fact that Mishra in particular is a prodigious spinner of the ball, lead to a stumping.

In a one-day game, if a batting team is running away with the situation, the spinner is usually brought on to tie things down; in T20, the spinner is brought on to get wickets. This is why off-spinners, who often operate in a more defensive mindset, were less successful in the IPL than the leggies. The opposition was able to milk someone like Murali; in a one-day game, if Murali could bowl 10 overs for 40 and chip in with a wicket, it could be a defining spell when others are going for 6 an over. In a T20 game, 4 overs, 1 for 24 really means much less than 4 overs, 3 for 32, which was what the likes of Chawla and Mishra were producing. Bhajji, in the one-day game, has taken to bowling for 1 for 40, which is what has turned him into the defensive bowler he has become in all forms of the game; had T20 been the dominant form of the shorter game over the last decade, he would have had an incentive to retain his initial attacking skills, his ability to flight and spin the ball, rather than just relying in bounce, variations in pace, and a doosra that has now become a stock ball with very little potential for surprise.

Of course, Mishra and Chawla were helped by the fact that their captains kept faith in them. But the point is, there was no way their captains could avoid doing so. In a one-day situation, keeping faith with an attacking spinner is a strategic decision, a gamble. Hence the continued debate around Monty Panesar’s relevance to England’s one-day plans, even though all the alternatives are utter mediocrities in comparison; hence the fact that Murali Kartik never did justice to his talent as a bowler, because he couldn’t get into the Test side, and was always caught between his natural attacking style and the pressure to be a containing bowler in the shorter version of the game. A captain encouraging and bringing out the best in an attacking spinner in one-day cricket is the exception rather than the norm (unless the spinner is a Warne, Kumble or Murali). In T20, an attacking spinner ought to be an essential part of a captain’s arsenal. Indeed, three of the four semi-finalists in the IPL had leg-spinners who were an essential part of their team’s success. If I were an IPL owner, I would be eyeing Monty Panesar with as much interest for 2009 as I would Kevin Pietersen.

So anyway, that’s my plug for the format. I think that, contrary to the conventional wisdom that is doing the rounds, T20 is not a slogger’s game. It requires great batting skill, the ability to get going without taking time to dawdle around, and rewards those who can plan their innings, adapt to situations, and play intelligently in partnerships. It also helps attacking, wicket-taking bowlers, who are far more likely to succeed in this format than in 50/50. If the ridiculous rule that brings boundaries in is done away with, so that boundaries in T20 are the same size as in the normal form, it will add a further dimension, giving attacking bowlers even more of a chance; putting more pressure on batsmen; and benefiting those who can play along the ground as well as in the air. Surely any format that has all these virtues is worth nurturing, especially if one can ensure that balance between bat and ball is not artificially skewed in advance by stupid rules.

Let me however return to what I started with:

“In my next post (which will take me some days to write, but it will show up eventually), I will suggest that the real worry is not about the format itself, but about the way in which the format will be milked by the powers-that-be (and here my big worry again is not about the death of Test cricket, but about the death of the domestic game, which will have seriously adverse consequences for cricket as a sport regardless of format); and that what is needed is some far-sighted, visionary leadership, one that seeks to use the T20 format not to fill coffers and score political points, but to genuinely develop the game in places where it needs developing (wishful thinking, of course, but no harm is pleading for it)”.

In other words, it is not T20 that will ruin the game. It is those who run T20 who are likely to do so. Those like Lalit Modi and Allen Stanford, who cannot see beyond their bloated egos and bloated wallets; those like Giles Clarke and Sharad Pawar, who will jump onto these bandwagons in the name of “developing” and “globalizing” the game while doing neither. What it needed is not tradition – an idyllic, romanticized, pastoral and utterly imaginary Test cricket that doesn’t exist anymore – but governance – accountable, visionary, with the interests of the game at heart rather than the interests of its sponsors. What such governance and vision might consist of has to be reserved for the next post a few days from now, so watch this space.