Tim Wigmore - Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution

INSIDE THE T20 REVOLUTION

TIM WIGMORE FREDDIE WILDE

First published in 2019 by

POLARIS PUBLISHING LTD

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Text copyright Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde, 2019

ISBN: 9781909715844

eBook ISBN: 9781788851886

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

To my dad for indulging my cricket obsession, and my mum and Fay, my partner, for tolerating it

Tim Wigmore

To my dad for introducing me to cricket, a constant source of joy for both of us, and for encouraging my T20 focus.

I have been fortunate that I have never had to look far for inspiration

Freddie Wilde

AUTHORS NOTE

Over the last few years, Freddie and I have had many too many, others would doubtless say conversations about Twenty20. For all that has been written and said about the game, we would often have questions that remained unanswered: about the skills of the game, culture and tactics, or how it was changing cricket off the field.

We wanted to read a book that would address these questions. As we couldnt find it, we decided to try and write it ourselves. Over the last couple of years, we have interviewed more than 50 players, coaches and administrators involved in T20 in search of answers about everything from the art and science of batting and bowling in T20, where matches are won and lost, how T20 has democratised the game, how the West Indies built a T20 dynasty, and what the future will hold. This book is the result.

It is not a definitive history of T20 cricket, but the story of how T20 has changed cricket and our attempts to get inside, and deconstruct, the T20 revolution. We feel that now is the perfect time for this book 16 years since T20 was created at professional level allowing us to reflect on all the changes it has wrought with the benefit of perspective.

So swiftly has T20 become part of crickets fabric that it is easy to ignore that, in terms of its global impact and fanbase, it is the most successful new professional sport to have been created this century, and for many years before. Yet we believe that T20 its skills and strategies, and the opportunities and challenges it presents to cricket worldwide remain poorly understood. Cricket 2.0 is our attempt to change that as T20 reaches a new level of maturity.

This book is solely on mens T20 cricket. T20 has transformed womens cricket too quite possibly even more so but that story deserves its own full telling, and there are others better qualified than us to do it justice.

Before we decided to work together, neither of us had considered writing a book like this individually. But we believe that collaborating together combining Freddies experience of working with T20 teams as well as analysing the game in his writing, and my experience as a journalist writing about T20 both on and off the field will make for a more rewarding book for readers. We have learned a huge amount in our interviews, research and writing of this book, sometimes reinforcing what we thought we knew, and other times challenging it and leading us to think anew. This is a book designed to be accessible both to T20 devotees and those with little previous knowledge of, or interest in, the game. We hope that, whichever applies to you, you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde

October 2019

FOREWORD

BY HARSHA BHOGLE

There is a custom in almost all Indian families that parents bear the cost of their childrens education, their marriage, sometimes the honeymoon and, wherever possible, do what it takes to set them up in life. Without quite being stated, this comes with the assumption that when the parents are much older, having to live off their pension (if there is one), the children start looking after them. The power structure might change but through the harmony of the parent-child relationship, the cycle continues.

So what is this nugget of Indian culture doing in this foreword? T20 cricket benefited from the family of Test and One Day International (ODI) cricket it was born in, but it has grown and become rich and successful and the time has come for it to carry its ageing Test match parents along to extend their twilight years. If you live in England or Australia you might try me for treason but you live in a little island of joy in a vast ocean. T20 has changed the way the game is played and taught, has altered lives dramatically, has welcomed more players into its fold and given them sustenance, and it has unlocked the value that lay dormant in cricket.

A year ago, I asked a senior executive in one of the leading stakeholders in Indian cricket what percentage of the total bid they would consider if they had to bid for Test match cricket alone. He let me finish my sentence and then said, You mean, if we bid. I often wonder where our game would have been if T20 hadnt appeared. It wouldnt have been dead cricket is far too resilient for that but antibiotics and painkillers would have been bedside.

So is T20 really cricket? With its outrageous hitting and quirky bowling styles, is it the enemy of cricket as we knew it or is it the saviour of our game? I met a young man, representing a generation that will take our world forward, at a discussion on whether T20 would ruin our cricket, on how it needed to be curtailed to allow Test cricket to prosper and he rolled his eyes and said, Your generation, na! When will you realise that the challenge to Test cricket comes not from T20 but from Netflix, from having the world at your fingertips on a handset?

I love T20 cricket. I have ever since I first heard about it and a year later, in 2006, when I saw my first game. I wrote on 21 January 2005 that it was time to feel the fresh breeze blowing our way, that our generation had to embrace it or it would leave us behind. I loved the fact that it demanded different skills from its participants, not inferior skills. I was fascinated by the new mindset where getting out might be tactically better than hanging on, I enjoyed seeing a new generation of players recalibrate risk and I was particularly enamoured by match-ups and the chess-like manoeuvring of pieces.