Just after eight o’clock on Thursday night, with the Hobart sky powder blue above the lights, umpire Paul Wilson began to whirl his right arm in the familiar PowerPlay gesture, before abruptly switching to three full rotations of his left, stern-faced but still jaunty, like a policeman forced to dance at the Notting Hill carnival.
In that moment history was made. This was cricket’s first Power Surge.
The surge is one of three much-trailed “innovations” in this year’s Big Bash tournament. It was an OK surge, as it happened. Tim David clumped some boundaries off Steve O’Keefe’s left-arm spin, bowled from such a low trajectory these days he runs to the wicket like a man hailing a late-night taxi. Jordan Silk produced the most astoundingly brilliant piece of fielding you’ll ever see, a one-handed full-levitation over-the-rope grab plus high-precision Superman flick-back.
And yet for all the build-up, the talk of brash and punkish changes, nothing much really happened. Without the crunchy logo you might have missed it, or mistaken the Power Surge for just a normal surge. In fact, watching all this red-hot innovation from a rain-shadowed London, there was time to think about the fact you don’t hear much about Shingy these days.
Shingy was a well-known figure a few years back, a modern-day seer, media guru, and really annoying guy. His job title at AOL was literally “digital prophet”, a role that involved “reading the tea-leaves of the internet”, thought-facing the tides of the global techno-verse, and appearing on TV panel shows looking like a malfunctioning cyborg pretending to be a witch.
Shingy’s real skill was talking seductive tech babble to middle-aged executives who have begun to feel the world had become new and strange; but that a slice of this pie could still be grabbed if you only listen to Shingy enough. This is how things work with prophets and rainmakers. Guru-ism feeds on insecurity, on a sense of needing to catch up, a search for shortcuts and magic spells.
Perhaps this is also a good way of thinking about those rather overhyped new rules, products of a flourishing guru-culture in Big T20, and the work in this case of Trent Woodhill, coach-slash-6-D strategist to the stars.
Woodhill holds, or has held, similar roles in both the Hundred and the Big Bash. He coached Steve Smith, Virat Kohli and Kane Williamson, whom he refers to, excitingly, not as batsmen but as “problem-solvers”. He is, from an oblique starting point, one of the more influential people in world cricket right now.
But influential how, and to what end? Certainly the Big Bash rules seem disappointingly un-sensational in action. The Surge is a two-over spell of fielding restrictions. The X-Factor means you can make a substitution. The Bash Boost is an extra point awarded in the second innings, a sensational innovation so boring it’s impossible to even remember what it is for more than five seconds at a time (you’ve already forgotten it).
And yet the response to this has been angrily polarised – of course, because nobody, no inanimate regulation tweak, is a civilian in the culture wars. Woodhill is convinced his changes will “blow up” the dominant paradigm. Various other people seem angry about it. “You can’t just tinker with T20 cricket,” was Brad Hogg’s verdict, a funny thing to say of something that is, essentially, a massive tinker.
There are some points worth making. First, it’s genuinely reassuring how quickly we can become attached to things, to the extent a rule change in a competition where people wear gold helmets and banter microphones is suddenly two steps from physically defiling the baggy green. Without this protective affection cricket would have faded away decades ago.
Second, Woodhill himself is fascinating, and someone English cricket fans need to get to know. His hand will be felt across the centrepiece of the English summer when the game returns. And yes, he is a bit Shingy.
Woodhill has been around all the major T20 leagues, doing bits. He’s a bespoke high-end batting strategist. He’s into analytics and data mining. He likes the decimalisation of the hundred balls, and cares nothing for the sanctity of overs. “Balls is the language of T20,” he has said, which is probably true on several levels.
I like him because he comes from the outside, isn’t a former great, exists on his own talent alone and has upset Proper Cricket Men with his grooviness. Also because he talks about energy and hope and so on.
What is startling is how much trust both Cricket Australia and the England and Wales Cricket Board are willing to place in some largely untried ideas, how much money, energy and eyeball-time is being coloured by one quite convincing bloke.
But then, guru-ism flourishes in times of uncertainty. The one clear shift in the months of lockdown is how honest cricket has had to be about the power of T20 and the financial pull of franchise leagues.
The fact the Indian Premier League final was able to pull in 200 million viewers at a time when, without it, the sport would have been totally invisible will be seen as a crowning moment in the location of power in the Indian subcontinent. Little wonder there is anxiety elsewhere, a search for a magic spell, a way of altering that gravity.
Back in Hobart the summer game seemed in pretty good health. James Vince played some beautiful, futile shots in a losing cause. The terrifying Riley Meredith bowled throat-ripping 95.5mph bouncers, then laughed about it. Nobody used an X Factor sub. The surge-power seemed more or less regulation.
Woodhill may or may not be the Shingy we need right now. But watching that cheerful flush of green (they even have fans now), it was hard to avoid the feeling the Hundred, whatever its final form, might also turn out to be a much-needed blast.
