The Dark Era of Classic Spirit

Sometimes I wish I lived in the early 19th century to watch the legends of the game mastermind its art. It would have been such a treat to watch Sir Jack Hobbs being hungry for runs, Sir Don Bradman’s masterpiece of batting, Sir Len Hutton’s classy drives, Sir Frank Worrell keeping it all along the ground; I feel unlucky that I wasn’t there to witness how great they were playing. But I enjoyed watching my time heroes: Glenn McGrath pitching the ball just outside the off-stump and making it dart around to flick the outside edge of the bat to be caught behind at the acrobatic slip cordon, Great Muttiah Muralitharan bamboozling the batsmen to get through the gate between bat and pad, Marvan Atapattu’s patient, long innings, Michael Vaughan’s elegant drives on the offside.

But the new era that dawned around the midway through the last decade, to me, is the downfall of cricket. The invention of Twenty-20 has brought the darkness into the game. It has caused to break the patience of elegant batsmen and to disturb the accomplishment of their batting as well as to reduce their foot-movements. Furthermore, it crunches the disciplined bowlers down on the ground to give an awful pleasure to the geek fans, who don’t enjoy anything else, but seeing the ball in the air.

And then came in the IPL, compromising the spirit of cricket for money and taking apart a big part of the international cricket calendar. I find most the changes that came out with T20 and around that time, so ridiculous: A ‘free hit’ after a no ball would do nothing but discouraging the bowler and the ‘super-over’ to get a result out of a tied game is even more ridiculous. They better put a coin-toss to find a winner rather than a ‘super-over’. I think cricket is being footballized or they are trying to match it with football or the other games. But the question is why does cricket need such kind of changes, which hurt its spirit, when it has an its own identity and a history of over 130 years at the international level?

Chris Gayle was recently pulled out of West Indies’ leading seat as he turned down the central-contracts, because he fancied the big lolly that he gets by playing for the IPL rather than the respect that he gets by playing more decent-spirited cricket at the international level for his country.

I find it making no sense when some geek fans say “the middle overs of 50-over games are rather boring”. What you enjoy in a One-Day innings are the various parts of it: first you survive with the new ball, then keep the scoreboard ticking; if you lost some early wickets, try and occupy the crease for a while and rebuild the innings with some steady partnerships and when you are into the closing overs of play, go hard at it and try and smash the ball around for some quick runs. However, England dumped 50-over games from their domestic circuit last summer and that could be an ominous gesture of One-Day-Internationals getting reduced to 40 overs per a side in the near future as well.

Adding much to worry about for the real cricket lovers, another T20 competition called ‘Champions league’ came into the already packed cricket calendar, reducing more international cricket.

As a consequence of those infections, Test cricket began to subside and ICC began to think about some more ridiculous changes to the greatest format of the game. MCC took on the then champions, Durham on a Day-Night, 4-day game with an un-traditional pink ball at Sheikh Zayed stadium, Abu Dhabi, in March, this year. But I guess they didn’t know that what they were doing would only tamper the spirit of the game even more. However they’ve found out some concerns about noticing the ball in the dark as the ball deteriorates. But the sad thing is, ICC hasn’t yet taken the idea of ‘Day-Night Tests’ completely out of its head.

If the things continue to move on in this way, we’ll be unable to find the whereabouts of Great, Old Test cricket, which has become a candle that is burning down to the ground. If we don’t get together to blow it off, it’ll be blown away into the history. But the thing is, what we can do to save it, still remains with a question mark.

-Sachintha Saputhanthri-