cricket with balls

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T20 is not everyone’s ideal form of cricket. We know that .

But it is here, and like our ancestors had to cope when they discovered the world was in fact round, cricket fans need to adapt.

But it is not an easy road. Talkback radio, and even comments on this site , have been littered with all sorts of fundamentalist religious nonsense about the world coming to an end.

It is not, and this World Cup is actually pretty good.

Lets debunk the fundamentalist theories

No-one Cares
The players care. The reason they care might not be a noble one, but they care all right.

And Ponting cared when his bowlers kept getting carted.

And the Dutch certainly cared when they stole the show on the first night. You don’t storm the ground like that unless you care.

How silly having a 7 over a side match
No-one wants a match shortened by rain, but this is England and there is only so much you can control.

But the theory that tossing a coin would be a fairer way of resolving the match shows how perspective is a luxury in this debate, and fits into the same category of logic as saying that rain is caused by Messers Duckworth and Lewis.

But if you want a real farce try starting a test match after 65% of the available time has been lost to rain. For the mathematically challenged, that’s around lunch on the 4th day.

The results are a lottery
No they’re not. In every game to date the better side has won. Missing 3 run-outs in the final over is not a lottery, it’s just bad play with the pressure on.

The shortened nature of the games means that teams are more likely to find themselves in a position where you need run-outs in the last over, but it is hard to see the negative in that.

Even allowing for that, there have been fewer upsets to date than at your average FIFA World Cup; surely the benchmark for what a World Cup should look like. There were no “lottery” calls when Cameroon and Senegal beat defending champions on opening day of those events.

And what’s wrong with a World Cup starting on a Friday and Australia eliminated on the Monday anyway?

It’s a stupid format
An ICC run tournament with a stupid format? Where’s the news in that?

It’s not actually the format that is wrong; it’s fast paced, sides are dropping out dialy, and to win it teams will need to play 7 games over a 2 week period. Nothing much wrong with that.

The only wart is the pre-ordained seeding in making up the Super 8 pools meaning that the game between New Zealand and South Africa, for example, is meaningless.

But to have been able to watch all of the world’s best players (except for Symonds) in action over a 3 day period has been unique.

It’s rigged in favour of the batsmen
Now we’re onto something, but this applies for test cricket as well .

The one thing that seems to be an anomaly in T20 cricket is the fielding restrictions. No, not the number of fieldsmen inside the circle rule, that is there for a good reason.

What needs to change, however, is the restriction of only 5 fieldsmen on the leg side. When you watch Taylor or KP squaring up to play in their skewed take on “The V”, it all seems so unfair.

This restriction was applied to test cricket after Bodyline, and in an age before helmets. Somehow, it has been retained in other games, even with the change to the leg-side wide rule.

So that is the one rule that should change; pack a cordon on the slog-sweep boundary and watch them go for it.

That would make it even better.

We await the cheque in the mail from the ICC