Does Australia want to be good at T20?

Well, another T20 World Cup has come around and yet again Australia has underwhelmed among the big boys of cricket.

After posting what seemed to be a competitive total of 8/178 and having the West Indies on the ropes with four overs remaining, somehow we lost the game.

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Well, I am being a bit harsh here, but for a nation like us who pride ourselves on being one of the best cricketing nations in the world, we have just never got the hang of Twenty-20 cricket.

Now, this in no means is an article designed to bag out Australian cricket, especially after an amazing summer which saw us complete the most incredible whitewash of England in the Ashes.

Then, led by our bowling attack, we dismantled the world’s number one Test team during three Tests in South Africa. It has marked a renewal in interest of cricket in Australia, something that had been dying off in recent years due to our lack of credible performances.

This year marks 10 years since the introduction of T20 cricket into the international landscape. It sparked a revolution of sorts, not seen since the colour of World Series Cricket by Kerry Packer and the new spectacle that it brought to the game.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’d rather sit down for five days and watch a riveting Test match than T20, but (unfortunately some might say) it is slowly taking over the game.

We have seen players like David Warner and Chris Gayle explode in T20, and slowly influence the longer forms of the game.

It has now become the norm for an opening pair in Test cricket to come out swinging and try to assert the ascendancy over the bowling team, with strike rates of 100 now common place.

Yes it makes it exciting, but purists would argue whether or not it is actually detrimental for the longer forms.

The Test matches here in Australia over the summer attracted more than half a million people through the gates, so attendance will never be a problem here.

However, it was quite shocking to see in South Africa that during the Test series between the number one and two sides in the world, there was never a full crowd.

In the three T20 matches the venues were packed. There are two things causing this – the convenience and the money.

It is so much easier for an audience to sit down for three hours, watch a whole exciting game then go home and talk about it.

Complaints about five-day cricket have arisen only since the introduction of shorter forms of the game, and it is drawing people away from the reason cricket became so popular in the first place.

The tense, tactical battles that featured intense skill and determination were the reason people loved cricket. Now, it’s all about being flashy and who can “entertain” the most.

This leads on to the second point, money.

The amount of money players can earn from T20 cricket is incredible, and yes I agree it is warranted given the incredible they are and how much less they are paid as cricketers than other sports.

But personally, I think it is becoming a bit ridiculous.

Players are beginning to throw away loyalty in terms of money, and while I can understand this, cricketing bodies such as Cricket Australia, the ECB and others should be enforcing measures to make sure they are paid well for paying the purist form of cricket.

I mean you only have to look at the way it united Australia during the Ashes series and show how much we all appreciate it.

All in all, I am not incredibly concerned about Australia’s lack of dominance in world T20, because with the players we are generating, it will happen sooner or later.

I’m more concerned with the way in which T20 cricket is taking over cricket. The sport, and purists like me, are suffering because of it!