One of my favourite recent cricket stories is the ballad of Atul Sharma, a hulking teenage javelin thrower plucked from obscurity and transformed briefly into a kind of slingy, right-arm Frankenstein’s monster by the maverick fast-bowling coach Ian Pont. You can still see Sharma in YouTube videos, in between lifting tyres and pumping weights, pounding in with his arm held out behind him and javelining it down in the nets at what appears to be alarming speeds. On a whim he even earned a short-term IPL contract with the Rajasthan Royals in 2009 before abruptly disappearing, a sensitive soul for whom this was all apparently just a little too much.
There were shades of the Sharma Identity about the news this week that a 26-year-old baseball player from Dallas called Boomer Collins is currently trawling the fringes of the global T20 leagues angling for a franchise gig. And why not? Hitting a ball between toe and waist height for six – base unit of Twenty20, the G-spot of the crowds – isn’t so far removed from the one-shot skill set of baseball hitting. Kevin Pietersen effectively won a Ram Slam match for the Dolphins this week by hitting 27 runs off 10 balls. Who’s to say Boomer couldn’t do the same on a flat track with a following wind?
New forms, new patterns: these are vital elements in any in sport, not least one as ragingly priapic and expansionist as Twenty20 cricket. And not least at a moment of near-complete saturation we might call peak Twenty20. Because let’s face it, it is frankly everywhere right now.
This Saturday Titans will play Dolphins in the final of the South African Ram Slam. Don’t despair, though. The Slam, and New Zealand’s simultaneous Georgie Pie Super Smash, are just curtain-raisers for the most densely plotted period of T20 yet devised. From Ram Slam/Pie Smash (Nov-Dec) we head to the Big Bash (Dec-Jan), Pakistan Super League (Feb), World T20 (Mar-Apr), Indian Premier League (Apr-May), Caribbean Premier League (Jun-Jul) and finally in August the late stages of the dear old Blast. So there it is. Ten months of Twenty20, the slightly disappointing magic realist novel Gabriel García Márquez never got round to writing, and above all proof – if it were required – that T20 has now won. It is the dominant music, the most visible, rampantly booming incarnation of its founding sport.
It is quite hard to talk about this. Even now there is an ideological edge to holding any kind of opinion on T20 cricket, tied into the sport’s past and its shifting present. Whereas to find fault, for example, with the IPL is to out yourself as a liver-spotted xenophobe and general postcolonial grudge-merchant. And yet even for a fan who genuinely enjoys this form, who has been to watch the IPL in India and loved it, T20 increasingly looks a little haggard beneath its baseball cap. In part it is the dominant mood that grates.
This is a sport still played out at that same founding pitch of astonishment, outrage, face-slapping bewilderment, still sticking it to the bourgeoisie, forever asserting and justifying its difference, like a middle-aged man at a rave very pointedly having more fun than anyone else in the room.
Of course, you can simply enjoy the skill and daring of the players. Not only is the ball flogged and lofted more effectively and more often, the best batsmen now play a range of flicks and ramps over the wicketkeeper’s head. Albeit the response to this from the sport’s TV marketeers, the apparently genuine shock – no! What? Again? – that such a thing could happen often seems a little automatic, a little forced, like the host at slightly awkward dinner party constantly fiddling with the music and laughing a little too loudly in the silences.
The fact is, after some rapid early gains, there has been an understandable plateauing out in the basic sporting content of T20. As might be expected of a single component part stretched out on a whim and now, years later, still performing its unaccompanied three-hour jazz flute solos every night at Madison Square Garden. You get the feeling some kind of outer limit has been reached in terms of more and faster and better.
Perhaps, from the playing side, we have already had the golden age of T20, that moment where a generation of meticulously schooled, genuinely top-drawer Test players were allowed to expand into unorthodoxy, like the classically trained modernists who produced the great experimental art of the 20th century, before everybody forgot how to draw and just made a pile of Lego bricks or a video instead.
Where exactly are the new stars of the new form? AB de Villiers, the one‑man state of the art, is about to turn 32; Chris Gayle, the T20 Bradman with 14 hundreds in the last four years, is 36 years old and played 50 Tests before he first swung a T20 bat.
England’s exiting new T20 players are, it is often said, “kids who’ve grown up playing this game”. But Jos Buttler, Sam Billings, Alex Hales, Eoin Morgan and Moeen Ali are all in their mid to late 20s, already teenagers when this game got going. To this day nobody has ever really hit a T20 ball more venomously than, say, Matthew Hayden, whose horrible little stroll down the pitch, bat raised like a man about to shatter a car windscreen with a polo mallet, remains a market leader, for all the froth, in orthodox, muscular malevolence.
Right now the average age of the world’s top 10-ranked T20 batsmen is 31. The top 10 T20 bowlers is blocked out by a rump of jobbing spin bowlers, among them a 36-year-old, two 35-year‑olds, a 34-year-old and no one under the age of 25. T20 may insist, constantly, on its own disco-ish vitality. But there is plenty of dad dancing going on out there.
In the end, the most profound innovation on show right now is revenue-related, a triumph of marketing, albeit with that same bafflingly gaudy staging, the podium-gyrating periphery that really does have to go some time soon. Beyond that the only most obvious benefit has been T20’s effect on 50-overs cricket, which was supposed to die or find itself squeezed to the fringes, but has instead been energised by the freedoms of the shorter game. And which is, oddly enough, the one form of international cricket currently being played as well as it ever has been.
So here we are. T20 came in a rush. Small variations side, it has remained in pretty much the same rush ever since. The real challenge is to produce something genuinely new – my Atul, my Boomer – a conviction that this really is a distinct and evolving form, not simply a gold rush that feeds only on itself, picking over the bones of what went before.
This is what I want from the next nine block-booked months. Not simply more and louder. But new forms, new modes, new rhythms.
