Twenty20 Cricket, Esq.

Cricket, like most sports, bears the birthmarks of its origins in pre-industrial and Victorian Britain. In its early days, aristocratic patrons of the sport would hire professional players, giving them sinecures such as the role of gamekeeper or groundsman on their property and allowing them to play for teams patronised by them. Later, players were employed by the county clubs which emerged in the 1860s and 1870s, drawing players away from the all-professional touring elevens which barnstormed England in the middle of the century.

Rugby and soccer, the other two great British gifts to human civilisation, endured fraught debates over the question of professionalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rugby officialdom’s intractable opposition to professionalism led to the Schism of 1895, as the working-class rugby cultures of Lancashire and Yorkshire seceded and went on to develop rugby league. Soccer managed to avoid a similar split by keeping the amateur and professional games distinct. English amateur soccer had its own leagues, its own national cup (until 1974), and its own national team (who played most European national teams before the professional English national team did).

Cricket, in contrast, avoided a rugby-style schism between amateurs and professionals, and also eschewed the soccer-style segregation between the two. Instead, English county and national teams, up to the abolition of the amateur-professional distinction in 1963, contained a mix of amateur and professional players, almost always with an amateur captain. Furthermore, the annual clash between the country’s best amateurs and professionals, the Gentlemen versus Players match, was the highlight of the English summer outside of a test series.

The reason for cricket’s modus vivendi lies in the different on-field roles of the amateur and the professional. Most bowlers were professionals; bowling, especially fast bowling, was seen as a form of manual labour. Most amateurs were batsmen, and their status was always said to give them licence to take a risk-free approach to batting, unlike the professional batsman who had to bat more defensively in order to safeguard his wicket, and therefore his employment. As sports historian Lincoln Allison put it: “[t]he Victorians saw batting as a graceful art form through which a gentleman could express himself. They saw bowling as skilled manual labour, requiring hard work and diligent practice.”

This is why the stereotypical English fast bowler is a Yorkshireman or hails from the Midlands (Lancashire, due to its moist climate and one-day league cricket culture, tends to produce better spinners), while the stereotypical English batsman comes from somewhere Down South, possibly via the universities. This was illustrated perfectly in the Ashes series of 1932-33, where the Nottinghamshire pacemen Harold Larwood and Bill Voce were instructed to bowl Bodyline by their captain, the Indian-born, Oxford-educated Surrey batsman Douglas Jardine, who flaunted his social status with his multi-coloured Harlequin cap.

(A note on Bodyline: ‘fast leg theory’ bowling was outlawed not in direct response to its use by the English tourists against Australia but after its use by the West Indians, in particular the Trinidadian Learie Constantine and the Barbadian Manny Martindale, against England in the northern summer of 1933. It seems that the gentlemen couldn’t have the same tactics used against them by bowlers of colour.)

With cricket administration dominated by amateur gentlemen (and thus batsmen), it was no wonder that the elegant strokeplay associated with their class came to be seen as the defining feature of the sport. This was not just true of England: after the 1930 Ashes series, Vic Richardson famously opined that Australia could not have beaten the local blind school without the leg spin of Clarrie Grimmett, which played a more important role in winning the series than Donald Bradman’s batting. But it wasn’t Grimmett who was feted as a national hero/national treasure.

Searching through old newspaper archives for cricket articles, one encounters the phrase ‘brighter cricket’ a lot between the 1900s and 1950s, reaching its peak in the years just after the Second World War. ‘Brighter cricket’ meant many things to many people: some advocated a fourth stump, some favoured the dismissal of a batsman who faced a maiden over, some wanted runs scored on the leg side to count double. Most wanted shorter matches, and major wartime cricket matches in England were one-day (but not limited-overs) affairs. But ‘brighter cricket’ seemed to always mean batsmen playing more shots and teams obtaining higher run rates.

In November 1962, the Marylebone Cricket Club made two momentous decisions at the same meeting. Firstly, it abolished the amateur-professional distinction, which had come to be seen as an anachronism. Secondly, it announced the start of a knockout limited-overs competition for 1963. This was to be the world’s first top-flight limited-overs tournament, and what came to be known as the Gillette Cup was the first to receive corporate sponsorship. These two decisions are seen as separate milestones in the modernisation of cricket. I will argue that they are more inter-linked than they appear.

The idea of a cricket match between two first-class sides being decided in one days’ play sounds deceptively attractive. But by limiting the number of overs available to each team to fifty or sixty, the risk of a team being bowled out is lessened, and becomes non-existent when the number of overs is reduced to twenty. Batsmen are forced to attack at all times and the fielding team is forced to bowl and field defensively in order to contain the run-rate; in this way, an artificial structure is imposed on the match, separating the teams into an ‘offence’ and a ‘defence’ instead of allowing captains to alternate between the two.

The gentleman amateur batsman may have been abolished, but the pro-batsman bias remained. When the Milan-born Sussex captain Ted Dexter deployed the cricketing equivalent of catenaccio against Kent in the first round of the inaugural Gillette Cup by setting an ultra-defensive field, he was rewarded with boos from the crowd and a harshly-worded letter from the Kent county committee. To counter such tactics (always a dirty word to the British upper classes), one-day cricket evolved fielding restrictions, a ten-over limit per bowler, bans on bouncers and underarm deliveries, two-run no-balls, ‘free hits’, a more stringent definition of what constitutes a wide, flatter pitches, shorter boundaries, meatier bats – all designed to shift the balance of power in favour of the batsman.

Furthermore, bowlers have continued to be seen as the proletarians of the cricket world. When England was menaced by Lillee ‘n’ Thommo in the 1970s, Dexter responded by penning Testkill, a novel centred around the fictional murder of an Australian fast bowler during the Lord’s Test. The West Indies’ legendary four-pronged pace attack of the 1970s and 1980s was subject to plenty of borderline-racist jibes; one respected cricket writer called them “seven-foot monsters”, and in 1991 the I.C.C. limited test bowlers to one bouncer per over to curb their domination of world cricket. The development of reverse swing by Pakistani quicks led to accusations of ball-tampering; in the 1996 libel case brought by Imran Khan against Ian Botham and Allan Lamb regarding the issue, former England captain John Emburey admitted in the witness box that he simply didn’t understand how reverse swing worked. And then there was Murali, subject to all sorts of humiliating laboratory tests by the same cricketing establishment that only grudgingly legalised over-arm bowling in 1864.

Twenty20 cricket is billed as something new, modern, revolutionary. They tell us that it is cricket for the time-poor, excitement-craving generation, as if first-class cricket was only ever attended by Colonel Blimp types. But there is nothing new under the sun, and the modern spectator’s preference for batsmanship over bowling simply reflects how little cricket has shed of its nineteenth-century aristocratic ethos.

The fifty-over game, with its emphasis on minimising runs instead of taking wickets, turned spin bowling into a dying art. Twenty20 cricket goes further and makes fast bowling risky: modern bats can edge a fast ball for four, or they could miss and four byes might result. The shortest format has thus seen a revival in medium-pace bowling, in order to ‘take the pace off the ball’. And while in the fifty-over game a bowler could still bowl a decent ten overs and impose himself on the contest, statistics show that Twenty20 bowling has little impact on the match: a specialist bowler averages, on average, only four runs less than a non-specialist bowler.

Limited-overs cricket has certainly given casual cricket fans and television audiences what they want – an incomplete simulacra of a cricket match in which good batting performances play a much greater role than good bowling performances. These consumer preferences are conditioned by a sporting culture which has historically favoured swashbuckling batting over consistent bowling or even defensive batting. 1963 did not mark the end of cricket’s amateur hegemony: it signalled instead the dawn of a new phase in the domination of the sport by the values of the Victorian landed gentry.