the beginning
The end of the Benson & Hedges Cup one-day competition in 2002, due to a ban on tobacco advertising, left a gap in the domestic calendar of English cricket.
England and Wales Cricket Board marketing manager Stuart Robertson proposed a 20-overs-per-side event, a format already known in amateur and junior cricket.
The aim was to attract a younger audience who may not have time to engage with longer formats. The first official Twenty20 county match took place in 2003 and proved to be an instant success in terms of attracting crowds.
More than 27,000 people came to see Middlesex play Surrey at Lord’s, the largest attendance for any county game in the “home of cricket” outside a one-day final since 1953.
That success was noted elsewhere, with the batsmen’s frantic pace and dynamic hitting that proved popular with audiences across the globe.
Yet there was a feeling that this was not “proper cricket”.
international sport
The first international T20 match between New Zealand and Australia at Eden Park in Auckland in 2005 saw both teams wearing retro kits from the 1980s, with New Zealand decked out in exact replicas of their “beige brigade” colors of that era.
Some players even wore fake beards and mustaches in honor of the styles of the time.
Australia’s man of the match Ricky Ponting said, “I think it is difficult to play seriously.”
But the growing popularity of the format was noted by the International Cricket Council and led to the opening of the 2007 Men’s T20 World Cup in South Africa. India defeated arch-rivals Pakistan in a thrilling final.
It has become so popular that most international tours now feature T20 games and there is a fear among conservatives that the shortest format is thriving at the expense of Test cricket.
IPL
Just as India’s victory in the Men’s One Day World Cup in 1983 changed cricket’s most populous nation’s attitude towards the limited-overs game, the title success of 2007 was equally transformative.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India, capitalizing on that success and intrigued by the Indian Cricket League, a private T20 event, introduced the Indian Premier League in 2008.
Not only did it effectively end the ICL, the new six-week tournament changed the global environment of cricket.
With the city-based IPL, where teams were controlled by wealthy private owners and squads based on players auctioned off, prominent cricketers could earn huge sums of money in a short amount of time.
Traditionally, the way to build a lucrative career was to become an established international in multi-day Test cricket and profit from the sponsorship deals that followed.
Now, however, there was another way, creating a global T20 circuit with the creation of other leagues like Australia’s Big Bash and England’s Blast.
This concept only extended to the Caribbean, with Pakistan and Bangladesh now in the act.
Future
The IPL has changed the game so much that the ICC has effectively put international men’s matches on hold during the normal April-May time frame for the tournament to ensure top-class cricketers remain available.
Now there is an uneasy co-existence between the formats, with the ICC creating the World Test Championship to consolidate the five-day game.
Some prominent players like India’s Virat Kohli recently declared that Test cricket will always be the “absolute pinnacle of the game”.
He said, ‘I will give everything to Test cricket as long as I play, I can assure you that, but how long his attitude in cricket lasts, it remains to be seen.
In a sign of the times, new cash-up T20 leagues are slated for South Africa, the United States and the United Arab Emirates from 2023, and woo players with big-money offers.
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