Yay! We Won!

Yay! We won!

When Twenty20 first kicked off, I was very elitist about it. Without quite knowing as much about cricket as the next person, I babbled something about how it was going to kill the sheer beauty of the game. I used to love cricket a lot. But I think somewhere around the Great Matchfixing Scandal, I felt a little cheated and began to see less of the game. Except when it was a really important match etc.

I know I cringed when Mandira Bedi began to yap between innings and overs. But something tells me that the game has become more inclusive. Perhaps the sheer numbers of hours that you can devote to it says something about it. If you are rich, have a trust fund or something like that, perhaps you can see the entire Test. If you are lucky, and the match is over a weekend, or luckier still and your office allows you to watch the match at work, then you can devote yourself to an ODI. But a Twenty20 bridges quite a few barriers. Who knows, maybe women’s cricket will get more popular if the matches are shorter. (Gulp!)

It suits my short attention spans. It means I don’t have to give up on an entire day. The players seem so charged that there are no “dull overs”. Every ball, every over makes a difference. For a person who thrives on thrill, Twenty20 is perfect. Ah! A boundary every over, a wicket taken once in two overs, the sudden increase in yorkers and batsmen being bowled out.

I have warmed upto Twenty20, but I am given to warming up to anything that we win at. Had we lost the Twenty20 World Cup, I would have gone on about how this version of the game was going to kill all the sheer beauty of cricket. But because we won, beauty is no longer an important consideration.

Besides, there’s more of a chance your nails survive in a shorter match.

There are some things that annoy me. Like those “gurls and boys” doing that choreographed dance every time there’s a boundary or a sixer. Or the strange amount of time the camera gushed over Shah Rukh Khan. (And seriously, what was Shah Rukh Khan wearing? Velvet?). Oh, and it doesn’t fail to amuse me how Chak De India! has become a cricket slogan!

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