Current location:	Edison, NJ
Current mood:	sympathetic
Entry tags:	cricket, timepass

T20 Cricket
Hehe... I know this is out of the blue, not at all in line with my present schedule or, for that matter, interest. But I was reading this article on how T20 cricket has been a Huuuuge success. Well, yes it may be. I personally do not like it at all. And people have said this ad nausea.

To be honest, I still rather prefer to lay back on the sofa and watch a cricket game for five days than watch a one-day game. I somehow am not bothered about all the hype. T20? Oopps, that is not cricket for me - for both technical and aesthetic reasons. Really, can anybody catch something as good as Brett Lee's bowling, or Sachin's stoic hundred, in the recent Australia tour of India on a T20, or even a one-day game? Also, 20 overs is not enough for ball to get old, or take turn, or reverse swing, or for a batsman to set his eyes :-)) blah blah blah.... All said and done, T20 looks more like baseball, and people here at US have not yet stopped making fun of cricket, let alone embrace it :-)

For me, cricket is still that really traditional game played in whites, on a lush green field for five good looong days - a game you can't really enjoy if all one can taste is hasty pleasure. For me, that is what made cricket a 'gentleman's game' - it was not game's duration, or the fact that player's can't touch each other - it is that if u don't understand controlled emotions, a tasteful elegance in music, a slow-moving ballet, you can't enjoy cricket. Art needs time, and patience. If you can't sit down for two days, you can't read Dostoyevsky, you are going to stop at Michael Crichton. We need to meaningfully smile, not shout - and realize smile is a hundred times more powerful than a shout. And a genuine test player, every champion for that matter, understands that three claps from known audience is better than a hundred 'hurrahs'. That is why cricket needs five days - to let the bowler measure his opponents, make strategies, and attack with cunning - exactly what Kumble does on a fifth day, not try wild throws and his luck. It lets the batsman live at the crease, make it his home, befriend the ball, and caress it lovingly to the boundary, not a wild swing trying to butcher the ball - it needs hard work, time and patience for art to come out of science, and that is not going to happen in T20. I feel sympathetic to T20 - a game that is lost of genuine elegance, where strokemaking is more of a brutal bar-dance rather than artful ballet, where bowling is more hiding than attacking, and spectators turn wild instead of aesthetic.