T20 is Killing Cricket

Today was T20 finals day at Edgbaston. My team – Warwickshire, or Birmingham Bears as we must now say in this rather sad American Baseball influenced era – have made it through to the finals. As I write, it seems unlikely that they will win, but that really does not matter. What is winding me up is that the commentators are constantly using the phrase “Take the pace off the ball”.

What this means, is that the most effective way to prevent a team from scoring runs is to bowl mediocre, but accurate medium pace tedium. I have written before about my love for fast bowling. It is the most exciting thing in cricket. Real spin bowling and skillful seam bowling are also amazing to watch, but nothing competes with out and out pace. Medium pace trundling, however, is shit. And yet that is exactly the type of bowling that prospers in the age of T20.

T20 is all about batting. We see artificially shortened boundaries and the shortened form simply places very little value on a wicket. It’s about sixes, fireworks and noise, but bowlers cannot expect any rewards. In this year’s IPL, 8 of the 10 best paid players are batsmen. 1 is an all rounder and only 1 is a specialist bowler.

Bowlers are completely undervalued and pace bowlers might as well give up. There are no fortunes to be made in the IPL or elsewhere for bowlers that can regularly exceed 90 mph. And yet these are exactly the type of bowler that we need in Test Cricket. A wicket is incredibly valuable in real cricket – you need to take 20 wickets to win a test match. That means you can have real, fast bowlers charging in with an attacking field, prepared to concede some runs, as long as they take wickets. That is cricket.

T20 sucks.

It is no surprise that the 2nd best bowler in England – Stuart Broad – was not picked for his county, who just won the T20 final. This is because he is a proper bowler and would therefore be expected to be carted all over the ground. Ridiculous.

Let’s consider history. Few people disagree that the best cricket team ever was the West Indies of the 1980s and 90s. No doubt, some of their batsmen, most obviously Viv, would have been incredible at T20. But how would the bowlers have fared? The likes of Roberts, Marshall, Holding, Croft, Garner, Ambrose & Walsh would have struggled in T20. How sad is that?

Why are we surprised that no such players are coming through the system any more?