Twenty20 more like 50:50

I watched the twenty20 international cricket game on Tuesday night. It was between Australia (current world champions in all forms of the game) and England (2nd placed Test team but around 6th in ODI’s and out of form). For those who aren’t familiar with the whole Twenty20 game, it is a cricket game (usual rules) but each team only gets 20 overs to bowl and bat instead of the usual 50 overs that is the norm in International one-day cricket. Basically it is a slog-aphon with teams stacked with power hitters and spin bowlers.

Now I am a cricket fan, but I am not a huge fan of this form of cricket. It appears that the game is heavily favoured to the team batting first. In fact, in Australia this year, there have been 10 games of Twenty20 cricket played between the various State cricket teams. In all ten games, the team batting first has one. In every game. (Stats on the cricket Australia Website – KFC Big Bash Series). That’s crazy stuff. What amuses me is that teams who win the toss are still sending in the opposition. They say that in One-Day cricket, 9 out of 10 times you win the toss, you should bat, and the other time, you should think for a second and then bat. I believe that in the twenty20 version of the game, you shouldn’t think at all, just bat.

The reasons for why the team batting second is doomed to fail are difficult to fathom. Here at the goat, I believe it is the pressure. The team batting first does not have a huge amount of pressure placed on them when they are batting. They can just get on with the business of scoring lots of runs. The team batting second however has to keep an eye on the runs required to win and the overs left remaining. While this is also the case in normal one-day cricket, at least if the team batting second gets a little behind the required run rate, they have a few more overs to address the problem. In Twenty20, they don’t have this luxury. If the run rate gets beyond 12 runs an over in twenty20, its pretty much over red rover.

Now for mine, any sport that is so dependent on the toss of the coin to win is not really a sport at all. Even most card games require a little bit of skill at the end of the day. Any game where Bermuda can beat the whole of the West Indies in a 20/20 game by just batting first (as occurred last year) is dodgy. They should play the games at Sydney’s StarCity casino instead of the SCG.

But the game is not for the purists; it’s for the masses. More specifically the under 25’s and also the female population. These two subsets of society have been notoriously difficult to convert to the game and the cricket mandarins have decided to for go the craft of the game and turn it into a spectacle. You could call it the Marijuana to Test cricket's cocaine. An entry-level drug that will hopefully lead to cricket's pure addiction.

And by any definition you would have to claim it as a success. Tuesday night’s game was watched by over 2,000,000 people in Australia and a full house at the SCG. With stats like that, it is no wonder that the ICC is thinking of a Twenty20 World Cup.

They players also don’t seem overly impressed by the game. Both Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist have publicly expressed that they are sceptical about the long-term future of the game. For mine, I’m with the players.