Fifty-over cricket is under threat like never before, says Mike Selvey. But it remains a vital cog in the international game’s wheel
Let’s hear it for the ODI Many years ago, the English actor Stanley Holloway, famous for his monologues, performed one called “My Word You Do Look Queer”. It is the story of a fellow who has been ill but, now recovered and feeling fine, goes out for a walk – only to be told by various folk how seedy he looks. The more he hears this, the more depressed he becomes and the worse he feels. Until he meets Old Jenkins. “My word,” says Jenkins, “you do look well!” It is all about perception. Sometimes we get told things so often that, even if we don’t want to, we start to believe them. When Bob Weston and Bert Lee wrote Holloway’s monologue, there was no such thing as a one-day international. Today, their work may even be seen as a metaphor for it. One-day cricket is being told so often that it is sick, most pertinently by those whose task it is to promote it, that we are all starting to believe it. We tinker with it, change the rules, change them back again, add overs, reduce overs, stick up floodlights, change the clothing and the colour of the ball, use more than one ball in an innings, and restrict the areas in which fielders can be placed. And all the while, we are telling one-day cricket how poorly it looks. Much of this has to do with Twenty20, the brash, blingy upstart which has been shouting and holding its noisy parties for a decade now. T20 is immediate, rapid, quickfire, urgent and to a large extent another metaphor for the way many live their lives now: what some call bish-bash-bosh. It is revved up, sells brilliantly well at present and underpins cricket at both ends of the spectrum, for 20-overs-a-side cricket has been played at club level for decades. What T20 lacks, though, is real narrative, of the kind one-day cricket possesses. Think of T20 as candyfloss: you bite it, taste it, like it and then suddenly it is gone. Take another bite: it is exactly the same – and it goes just as fast. There is a sameness to T20 that does not translate historically. Statistically (and let us be honest about 8
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this: statistics are a vital component of how we perceive cricket) T20 lacks relevance, simply because there is not time to build figures of consequence. Truly memorable innings are a rarity and sixes so commonplace (helped by playing-areas the size of circus rings, a natural result of selling sixes to a sponsor who is hardly going to sanction bigger boundaries) that they are no longer an event. One day we may find extra runs awarded for distance the ball is hit. This is, however, not meant to be a dig at T20 – a brilliant concept if not overdone – as much as a defence of the older brother. The upstart is pushing it into the background – and some would say to death’s door, its imminent demise leaving room at international level only for Test cricket at one extreme and T20 at the other. We now embark on the final edition of the Champions Trophy, a competition generally regarded as a sort of World Cup Lite. This is a shame, for it puts into the shade the overblown, ponderous World Cup itself. It is a firm personal belief that the one-day international remains relevant. As with all areas of the game, it has progressed, a long journey since that day, more than 42 years ago at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, when Geoffrey Boycott gave it the gentlest of births with a steadfast innings of eight from 37 balls (and no boundaries). We have seen well over 3,000 matches now, in 463 of which Sachin Tendulkar has played. There have been ten World Cups. Shahid Afridi of Pakistan once made a century from 37 balls; and Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag have both made double-hundreds. These are the things that linger in the memory. One-day cricket offers ebb and flow, a fightback, the chance for resurrection, form rediscovered, the devastating bowling spell, and the time to savour players at the peak of their form. We still talk of Clive Lloyd’s World Cup final century, those of Viv Richards, Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist, and of M. S. Dhoni’s