Less is Absolutely Not More

FIFA is reportedly going to abandon 90-minute football, and base the World Cup, and all international games, entirely on penalty shoot-outs, because the younger generation can’t be bothered with a sport that lasts an hour and a half.

The IOC is about to cut all track distances beyond 800 metres, with the 3000m steeplechase becoming a 400m race.

Tennis majors will be single-set matches for both men and women (equality at last!), and their golf counterparts will be just nine holes long.

Better still, all major golf events will become Crazy Golf.

Have you finished laughing yet?

Well, sober up, because it seems that that’s the Spirit of Cricket, according to some influential figures in the game.

But while other sports are not completely immune to gimmickry, it seems that cricket is unique in the fact that there are administrators who think that there’s altogether too much of it, and less would definitely be better.

ICC Chief Executives’ Committee member Anurag Bhatnagar is the latest to join this pernicious company.

Promoting the idea of his Hong Kong Sixes becoming an approved international format, he has told Tristan Lavalette’s admirable Cricket Financial Journal that the ‘kids’ not only have no time for Tests and ODIs – even T20 is beyond their concentration span.

“Test cricket is no longer what it used to be,” Lavalette quotes him as saying. “The ODIs are considered far too long. T20 studies show that the maximum viewing is between the first six overs and the last six.

“The middle eight overs, people are doing their own thing, and more often they’re scrolling their phones, so Sixes cricket appeals to a younger generation.”

We’ve heard calls in the past for ODIs to be cut to 40 overs, on the grounds that there’s a boring passage of play somewhere in the middle.

But it does take some gall to write off overs 7-14 of a T20 match as dull ‘middle overs’.

Why is it only cricket that seems to attract this kind of subversive nonsense?

Time was, when serious students of the game were prepared to assert that Test cricket was the finest game ever invented by humanity, not only the pinnacle format, but something so perfect in its encapsulation of human life that it surpassed all other forms of sporting activity.

And it’s true that few other sports offer the multi-faceted, shifting, often almost unbearably tense experience we get when two well-matched sides are battling it out on a pitch suitably prepared for a five-day contest, although it’s true that the declining skills of both batters and groundsmen are making such games less and less common.

And that’s part of the point: the increasing domination of shorter formats, and especially T20, is eroding the ability – or, indeed, the willingness – of international cricketers to bide their time, to duke it out against hostile bowling in conditions which, at this point in the contest, favour pace or spin, to wait until those conditions have changed, the ball gets older, the cloud cover lifts (all right, I know some pundits now claim that’s a myth), the track flattens out.

Better to have an almighty swing, and get the crowd cheering and the commentators purring about the fact that that six had travelled 107.4138 metres.

And if you miss, and find your middle stump cartwheeling towards the keeper’s midriff, well, at least you gave the mob what they wanted – and a three-day Test gives you a couple of extra days’ golf.

I once watched a T20I where, after the opener had defended the first three, absolutely superb deliveries, a drunken yob in front of me got up and bawled: “Ave a go, yer f****** c***!”

So if a six-over-a-side thrash is your thing, and you can’t be bothered to learn to appreciate the ebb and flow of the game’s ultimate format, then fine, but don’t make your case by belittling longer matches which enrich the lives of many people with the patience and yes, leisure, to appreciate them.

Because in the end this is about two entirely different kinds of enrichment: the one I’ve experienced watching Garfield Sobers, David Gower, Gordon Greenidge, Virat Kohli and Joe Root bat, or Ray Lindwall, Sobers, Malcolm Marshall, Dale Steyn, Intikhab Alam ands Mitchell Starc bowl, and the one which has become almost the sole purpose of those running the game.

Which is to extract as much money out of cricket as possible in the shortest possible time, without regard to the pleasure the longer formats, and the longest format in particular, continue to give to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people.

The less cricket, the greater the profit, they seem to believe, and for them, Contracting Cricket (pun still intended) is preferable to Emerging Cricket.

I’m just glad I won’t live to see the Super Over World Cup.

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