On Cricket

I’ve been watching every match possible in this season’s Big Bash League. It’s addictive viewing, but it’s not very good cricket.

Cricket has always had voices from within calling for a more exciting game, or ‘brighter cricket’ as it was known in the parlance of the early to mid-twentieth century. The 1919 County Championship was played over two days of four sessions each; major wartime matches in England were played as one-day single-innings affairs. There were serious calls for enlarging the wicket or adding a fourth stump, or for altering the leg before wicket law to even the contest between bat and ball.

My thesis is that the administrators of the sport erred in adopting formats involving limited overs. Limited-overs cricket has a fatal flaw, which only gets worse as matches are shortened. By limiting an innings to a number of overs, and in particular a number of overs in which it is difficult to lose ten wickets, it shifts the emphasis from taking wickets to preventing runs. Thus the fielding layouts one sees in a test match – with multiple slips, a gully, a silly mid-on or silly mid-off, and a helmeted bat-pad – don’t occur in the limited-overs game.

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that the typical Big Bash League field consists (from the perspective of the television viewer) of a bowler, a wicketkeeper, and empty space – because the other nine guys are all standing around the boundary. This means that rather than make the batsmen earn every run, they are prepared to concede ones and twos in order to save the fours and sixes. Thus, we end up with a more dour and defensive game.

There is a way, however, that one can have ‘brighter cricket’ without the ultra-defensiveness of the limited-overs game, while concluding matches in a much shorter timeframe than the four or five days it takes to complete a first-class match.

As a thought experiment, imagine if all major cricket matches were played as one-day, single-innings matches (though there may be some provision to complete an unfinished match on a second day, for example in the case of rain). The side batting first would do so until they declared or were bowled out, and their opponents would chase the target they set. Four sessions of thirty overs each might be the optimum length for a match. Imagine also that pitches were prepared with less batsman- and fast bowler-friendly bounce, so that these one-day contests were played on the equivalent of a fourth-day or fifth-day pitch in a test match.

The first consequence would be that the game would be more attacking. Needing to bowl their opponents out instead of merely restricting their scoring, fielding captains would place more fielders in catching positions, instead of along the boundary.

The second consequence would be that the cricketing calendar could be brought kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. We might have something resembling baseball: leagues of eight, ten, or twelve teams playing their opponents twice or four times per season, with the league champions meeting in post-season best-of-three series. These leagues would imitate the various post-2008 Twenty20 leagues in being based around franchises instead of provinces, but hopefully would avoid the technicoloured clothing and the abstract-noun nicknames. Proper league competitions, the bread and butter of every other sport, would replace the hodge-podge calendar of bilateral test series and triangular one-day series.

Test matches might still be played, but the changes in pitch preparation would mean that they wouldn’t need to be scheduled for five days – forty wickets would usually tumble long before then. A World Cup might be played, but would feature one-day, single-innings matches.

This way, we would get a shorter form of cricket, which would actually involve players employing all the skills used in cricket, instead of the sordid display of mere slogging and outfielding that is the Big Bash League.