The Times of India
Yes, It Is Cricket by Anil Dharker 1 Jun 2008, 0311 hrs IST
"Enjoying the game?" my friend Jai said to me as I punched the air after a Jayasuriya six. "Hmm, yes," I replied.
"So, you think this format is ok, do you?" There was an unmistakable note of irony in his tone which I heard even above the crowd's roar. "Yes, sure," I said, "Why do you ask?"
His amused smile told me why. Here I was cheering lustily, criticising captains for wrong selections, quoting statistics of strike rates and economy figures, when not so long ago I had been the cricket purist, talking about Twenty20 being the death of cricket. And this morning I realised how complete my conversion was when I read an interview with Imran Khan, former playboy cricketer, now professional interviewee: "IPL is a spectacle... it could mean the death of Test cricket," he said. The old fuddy-duddy, I found myself saying.
At what point did I become a believer? What made me change from being a scornful critic of the Twenty20 game to someone who organised his social life around vital matches? It wasn't because of the World Cup, that's for sure. That was different: India was winning every match and the surge of nationalism would have made us excited about any form of any game. I remember being in Delhi for the quarter- and semi-finals. We watched both from the same seats in the same overcrowded pub: people were cheering and shouting, complete strangers embraced each other as India won and the pub owner came to us and said, "Please, please come for the final and sit in the same seats. Drinks and dinner on the house."
The real test of Twenty20 was the IPL. No patriotic fervour here; not even city or regional loyalties were involved. Sanath Jayasuriya and Shaun Pollock are Marathi manus? Glenn McGrath is a Delhite? Mahendra Singh Dhoni is from Chennai and Shane Warne is Rajasthani? The idea boggles the mind. Yet, one day I found myself saying without even noticing it, "You know, we should have won the match. We were outplaying them." And someone replying, also without any trace of self-consciousness, "Our strategy was wrong. We let them escape." "We", "Our", "Us" and "Them": the loyalties had, unknowingly, formed. All of us in Mumbai now owned the Mumbai Indians, not just Mukesh Ambani, just as the ownership of the Kolkata Knight Riders went beyond Shah Rukh Khan.
There is, of course, a precedent for this in the English and European football leagues. How many players from Manchester are there in Manchester United? They have had players from the South of England, from Brazil, from France, from Germany... But the moment they wore the United's red jersey, they were Man U, and the club song and the tribal chanting of their fans were noisily behind them.
If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that these footballers, and now the IPL cricketers are no better than the mercenaries who would fight wars and battles for the highest bidder. But the cynical view is often wrong, and it is wrong here. What you see on a football match or on the cricket field between two champion teams are young men at the peak of their powers, supremely fit and exceptionally gifted athletes who want to do just one thing, which is to excel at what they do best. And be seen to excel by the rest of the world. The team they play in, whichever it might be, becomes their team because it enables them to do the only thing they want to do. Bonding follows, and as anyone who has taken part even in office games will testify, team spirit develops quickly even in an afternoon game of only mock seriousness. Professionals living and eating together, practising and playing together have very many more opportunities to meld together as one unified unit. Tribal loyalties—however temporary—develop and become stronger through the adrenaline rush of the moment and the vociferous urgings of thousands of supporters.
But none of this would have mattered if it hadn't been for one vital fact: somewhere in these last few weeks of non-stop cricket, something strange happened to the game itself. When Twenty20 began, it really wasn't much more than a game of the cross-batted, baseball-style slog. You connected and you hit a six; you didn't and you took the long walk home. Since a lot of the players were young men with superior hand-eye co-ordination, the ball sailed over the ropes with metronomic regularity. That's why the purists baulked at this format and dismissed it so quickly.
But that was a century ago, which in today's frenetic times is less than a year or so. Over the long weeks of the IPL, with each team playing as many as 14 matches each, with pitches and conditions in our vast country varying from one venue to another, Twenty20 stopped being a boringly predictable slogging game. Captains began to plot and think, bowlers chalked out survival strategies that soon became clever tactics to outwit each batsman out. In other words, games became contests. And a contest with its up and downs, playing out its entire drama in just three hours in an amphitheatre holding thousands, was as good as it gets.
Does that mean Test cricket is dead? Did One-Day cricket kill it? It didn't; what it did was improve it. Twenty20 will do the same to both. Change Tests and the One-Day game for the better. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go: I have to prepare for the final tonight.
-- Cricket is an Indian game accidentally invented by the British. - Ashis Nandy in 'The Tao of Cricket'