XPost: uk.sport.cricket, aus.sport.cricket

======================================================================


https://www.thecricketmonthly.com/story/1430929/2024-men-s-t20-world-cup---how-t20-has-changed-cricket-forever


How T20 has changed cricket forever

Twelve ways in which the shortest format has transformed the sport
Matt Roller | May 15, 2024


No matter who wins it, the ninth men's T20 World Cup, in June, will
showcase a sport that has changed beyond recognition. Cricket has become
a commercial behemoth since T20's birth in 2003, with players travelling
the world on short-term contracts and associated with privately owned franchises as well as their national teams - and the changes to the game
on the field have been just as marked.

Generation Six
Trent Bridge hosted a T20 Blast quarter-final between Nottinghamshire
and Somerset in August 2017, but a few hours earlier Sky Sports filmed a six-hitting contest between two of England's modern greats. Andrew
Flintoff, then 39, was among the most devastating batters of his
generation; he was up against Jos Buttler, who at 26 was still
approaching his prime.

The challenge was simple: Flintoff and Buttler were fed three throwdowns
each from Rob Key, plus one practice throw, and had to hit the ball as
far as they could. Flintoff, who had played his final professional match
two years earlier, maxed out at 92 metres; when Buttler launched his
practice throw 103 metres into the top tier of the pavilion, Key and
host Nasser Hussain fell about laughing.

Flintoff's technique was based around straight lines, locked wrists and
weight transfer; Buttler relied on hand speed and his wrists whipping
through the ball. It was a plain demonstration of T20's liberating
effect on batters: Buttler grew up in an era that allowed him to place a
much lower value on his wicket, and much more emphasis on his ability to
hit sixes.

Where once there was room for an "anchor", there is now an expectation
that every batter in a top T20 line-up should be able to clear the
boundary. In the IPL's first season, there were 2.7 fours for every six
hit; in IPL 2023, that figure had dropped to 1.9 fours for every six. In
April Kolkata Knight Riders and Punjab Kings hit 42 sixes between them
in a single match, more than one per over.

Big guys finish best
In the 1990s, Michael Bevan was Australia's finisher in one-day cricket.
Few could pace an innings like him: he finished not out in 30 ODI run
chases, and Australia won 25 of those games. In his book Playing the
One-Day Game, Adam Gilchrist described Bevan as "an expert in clever
placement, audacious running and inventive strokeplay". He did not lack
power but he relied primarily on working the ball into gaps and rotating strike: he hit only 21 sixes in a 232-match ODI career, one every 444 balls.

At the T20 World Cup in June, Tim David will be Australia's finisher.
The role has the same name, and like Bevan, David never made it as a
Test batter; in fact, at 28, he has never even played a first-class
match. But David is a pure hitter who uses his height and strength to
muscle the ball over the boundary, in the mould of Kieron Pollard and
Andre Russell. He only faces 12 to 13 balls per match on average but
earns an annual US$1 million from his IPL contract alone. The art of
finishing an innings has changed beyond recognition.

Give us your best shots
Scoop, paddle, ramp, starfish: whatever you call it, the shot existed
before T20. Douglas Marillier and Ryan Campbell were both flicking and shovelling balls over their left shoulders years before Tillakaratne
Dilshan lapped Shane Watson over Brad Haddin's head at Trent Bridge.
Reverse sweeps have been around even longer, since at least the 1970s.

So what has changed? The ubiquity of shots that were once the preserve
of the sport's innovators. Aaron Finch has observed that "almost
everyone ramps, [and] everybody reverse-sweeps and hard-sweeps" even in
county cricket - hardly associated with cricket's cutting edge. Emerging
modern batters now have a full repertoire of 360-degree shots: for
evidence, just look at Tristan Stubbs' outrageous reverse slaps over
short third for Delhi Capitals in the 2024 IPL.

Spinners be winners
When England launched the first professional T20 league in 2003, there
was a widespread belief that this was bad news for spinners. "We thought
they'd be hopeless," Adam Hollioake, who captained Surrey to the trophy
in the inaugural Twenty20 Cup, recalled. That mindset permeated the
format's early years: it took until the third men's T20 international
for any team to pick a frontline spinner.

Instead, spin has become a pivotal feature of the T20 game: spinners
bowled a record 41.7% of overs in the 2023 IPL - compared to just 23.2%
in 2008 - and four of the top five wicket-takers in the format's history
are spinners, with Dwayne Bravo the only exception. Every top T20 team
features either a wristspinner or a mystery spinner, with the ability to
turn the ball both ways.

With five fielders stationed on the boundary, spinners' margin for error
is far greater in T20 than in Tests. As R Ashwin has suggested, "Six well-constructed bad balls could be the way to go forward in T20
cricket." The format has revolutionised the way legspin is bowled too:
there are more modern spinners who resemble Anil Kumble than they do
Shane Warne, with shorter average lengths and faster, flatter
trajectories in vogue - as modelled by Rashid Khan.

Spinners who bowl out of the front of the hand have come in and out of
fashion. They largely disappeared after the ICC cracked down on suspect actions, but are on the rise again: at this World Cup, expect Akeal
Hosein, Mitchell Santner and Maheesh Theekshana to bowl seam-up
deliveries that drift into right-handers with the new ball.

Unorthodox is the new orthodox
The T20 era has normalised the abnormal, especially when it comes to
fast bowling. Seamers with low, slingy trajectories or idiosyncratic
actions have proved particularly valuable in the modern era: Lasith
Malinga was the outstanding fast bowler of T20's first decade, and his
former Mumbai Indians team-mate Jasprit Bumrah has taken that mantle on
in the past ten years.

Malinga's action was once considered unique but his success has spawned
a generation of imitators: Sri Lanka's Nuwan Thushara and Pakistan's
Zaman Khan also use low-arm, slingshot actions, while Matheesha
Pathirana - dubbed "Baby Malinga" - is his protégé, and has regularly
ripped stumps out at the IPL.

We'll take it slow
Dwayne Bravo, the format's all-time leading wicket-taker, has led the
way when it comes to variations: towards the end of his career he would
often bowl 20 slower balls in a four-over spell. Every multi-format fast
bowler now has at least one slower ball, and often two or three:
offcutters, legcutters, back-of-the-hand deliveries or knuckleballs.

Some T20 specialists - such as Ravi Bopara - have reached the stage
where they exclusively bowl "change-ups". Benny Howell, the English
allrounder, defies categorisation: his ESPNcricinfo profile describes
his bowling as "right-arm medium" but he labels himself a "fast spinner"
and has flippantly claimed to have 50 different deliveries in his armoury.

Fielders of our dreams
Watch highlights of any game from the 20th century and you will be
struck by the standard of fielding - and not in a good way. You'd be
lucky to see anyone sliding along the outfield, trying to prevent a
boundary. More often, fielders escort the ball like bodyguards, keeping
their distance.

Things improved as the game professionalised but there has been a marked
change in the modern era. "T20 triggered a real momentum shift in
fielding and the attitudes around it," Paul Collingwood has observed.
Relay catches are now so common that ESPNcricinfo's scorecards note both fielders involved. Most teams practise relays immediately before a game.

Only a handful of players can get away with being "hidden" in the field,
and the change is most notable with fast bowlers. In a previous
generation, they could hardly hide their disdain for the entire craft;
now, even 6ft 7in Reece Topley can be found taking screamers at short
fine leg in the IPL. When the BBL ran a poll of the best catches of the
2023-24 season earlier this year, all four involved Michael Neser.

Keep up, will ya
The early days of T20 prompted a theory that the format would bring
about a resurgence of specialist wicketkeepers, picked for their glove
work more than their batting. In reality, it has gone the other way,
with keepers generally involved in only a handful of balls per innings,
most teams are content putting a part-timer or a stopper behind the
stumps, so long as they can contribute substantially with the bat.

Keepers have become increasingly innovative, with a general shift from
soft hands to strong hands in their technique. MS Dhoni's lightning-fast
hands and no-look run-outs have led the way - no wicketkeeper has more dismissals in the format - but standards have shot up: just watch
Heinrich Klaasen's recent stumping of Shikhar Dhawan while stood up to Bhuvneshwar Kumar for proof.


Do we match up?
The terminology is new, even if the idea is not: in the 1932-33 Ashes,
Douglas Jardine realised that hostile fast bowling was the best match-up
for Donald Bradman. In any format of the game, but particularly in limited-overs cricket, captains have always tried to use their bowlers
at the best possible time; and batting pairs have always tried to ensure
that the right batter is on strike against the right bowler. But T20 has fundamentally changed the way captains think, with their decisions now
seen primarily through the lens of resource deployment.

Statistical evidence increasingly supports the long-established theory
that batters find it much easier to play balls that spin into them than
those that turn away. "If you are a fingerspinner - a left-arm spinner
or an offspinner - you need to know how to turn the ball the other way
for teams to have the confidence to play you as a genuine bowler,"
Dinesh Karthik has observed.

It has also accelerated the role of data analysis: every T20 dugout in
the world will feature at least one analyst - if not two or three -
whose influence may be far greater than many realise. The use of data
has enhanced the sport, generally backing up the instincts of the most attacking players: "People talk about taking risks all the time, and T20 cricket being so risky," Eoin Morgan said in Cricket 2.0. "[But]
naturally, you don't take as high a risk as you should, and as data
tells you to."

Wickets are cheap
Perhaps the single biggest difference between 50-over and 20-over
cricket is the value of a single wicket. Around one-third of ODI innings culminate in a team being bowled out but in T20Is, the equivalent figure
is around one-fifth. The principal effect has been predictable,
liberating batters to attack much more with much less concern about the prospect of losing their wicket. Virat Kohli, for example, is dismissed
once every 63 balls in ODIs but once every 37 balls in T20Is.

The contrast has had some intriguing consequences. Increasingly often,
it can actually suit bowling teams to keep a struggling batter at the
crease. In 2014, Yuvraj Singh made 11 off 21 balls in the T20 World Cup
final, limiting MS Dhoni to only seven balls and leaving Suresh Raina
unused entirely; Sri Lanka cruised to their target of 131 with 13 balls
to spare. The recent counter has been teams placing such a low value on
wickets that they are comfortable retiring batters out. R Ashwin, as so
often, set the trend.

Luck of the coin
Once the simplest part of any game, the toss has increasingly
convoluted, and at times has seemed to determine the outcomes of whole tournaments. In the era of the impact player, IPL captains walk out to
the toss with two separate team sheets and name a different XI depending
on whether they are batting or bowling first; in the BBL, the
traditional coin has been replaced by a novelty bat flip.

But the real change at the toss is its outsized ability to influence
results in T20, particularly in floodlit games where conditions change significantly from one innings to the next. There is a slight bias in
favour of chasing teams across T20 history but in certain tournaments
there has been a clear sense of "win the toss, win the game": at the T20
World Cup in the UAE in 2021, chasing teams won 22 out of 33 floodlit
matches from the Super 12s stage onwards, including all three knockout
games. Australia, the eventual champions, won the toss in all six of
their victories; the only time they lost the toss, they were thrashed by England in Dubai.


Matt Roller | May 15, 2024

No matter who wins it, the ninth men's T20 World Cup, in June, will
showcase a sport that has changed beyond recognition. Cricket has become
a commercial behemoth since T20's birth in 2003, with players travelling
the world on short-term contracts and associated with privately owned franchises as well as their national teams - and the changes to the game
on the field have been just as marked.

Generation Six
Trent Bridge hosted a T20 Blast quarter-final between Nottinghamshire
and Somerset in August 2017, but a few hours earlier Sky Sports filmed a six-hitting contest between two of England's modern greats. Andrew
Flintoff, then 39, was among the most devastating batters of his
generation; he was up against Jos Buttler, who at 26 was still
approaching his prime.

The challenge was simple: Flintoff and Buttler were fed three throwdowns
each from Rob Key, plus one practice throw, and had to hit the ball as
far as they could. Flintoff, who had played his final professional match
two years earlier, maxed out at 92 metres; when Buttler launched his
practice throw 103 metres into the top tier of the pavilion, Key and
host Nasser Hussain fell about laughing.

Flintoff's technique was based around straight lines, locked wrists and
weight transfer; Buttler relied on hand speed and his wrists whipping
through the ball. It was a plain demonstration of T20's liberating
effect on batters: Buttler grew up in an era that allowed him to place a
much lower value on his wicket, and much more emphasis on his ability to
hit sixes.

Where once there was room for an "anchor", there is now an expectation
that every batter in a top T20 line-up should be able to clear the
boundary. In the IPL's first season, there were 2.7 fours for every six
hit; in IPL 2023, that figure had dropped to 1.9 fours for every six. In
April Kolkata Knight Riders and Punjab Kings hit 42 sixes between them
in a single match, more than one per over.
Strong-arm tactics: big, muscular batters like Tim David are the
finishers of choice in limited-overs cricket today

Strong-arm tactics: big, muscular batters like Tim David are the
finishers of choice in limited-overs cricket today R Satish Babu / ©
AFP/Getty Images

Big guys finish best
In the 1990s, Michael Bevan was Australia's finisher in one-day cricket.
Few could pace an innings like him: he finished not out in 30 ODI run
chases, and Australia won 25 of those games. In his book Playing the
One-Day Game, Adam Gilchrist described Bevan as "an expert in clever
placement, audacious running and inventive strokeplay". He did not lack
power but he relied primarily on working the ball into gaps and rotating strike: he hit only 21 sixes in a 232-match ODI career, one every 444 balls.

At the T20 World Cup in June, Tim David will be Australia's finisher.
The role has the same name, and like Bevan, David never made it as a
Test batter; in fact, at 28, he has never even played a first-class
match. But David is a pure hitter who uses his height and strength to
muscle the ball over the boundary, in the mould of Kieron Pollard and
Andre Russell. He only faces 12 to 13 balls per match on average but
earns an annual US$1 million from his IPL contract alone. The art of
finishing an innings has changed beyond recognition.

Give us your best shots
Scoop, paddle, ramp, starfish: whatever you call it, the shot existed
before T20. Douglas Marillier and Ryan Campbell were both flicking and shovelling balls over their left shoulders years before Tillakaratne
Dilshan lapped Shane Watson over Brad Haddin's head at Trent Bridge.
Reverse sweeps have been around even longer, since at least the 1970s.

So what has changed? The ubiquity of shots that were once the preserve
of the sport's innovators. Aaron Finch has observed that "almost
everyone ramps, [and] everybody reverse-sweeps and hard-sweeps" even in
county cricket - hardly associated with cricket's cutting edge. Emerging
modern batters now have a full repertoire of 360-degree shots: for
evidence, just look at Tristan Stubbs' outrageous reverse slaps over
short third for Delhi Capitals in the 2024 IPL.
Wrist assured: among the top five all-time wicket-takers in T20, four
are spinners. Rashid Khan is at No. 2 with nearly 600 dismissals

Wrist assured: among the top five all-time wicket-takers in T20, four
are spinners. Rashid Khan is at No. 2 with nearly 600 dismissals Sajjad
Hussain / © AFP/Getty Images

Spinners be winners
When England launched the first professional T20 league in 2003, there
was a widespread belief that this was bad news for spinners. "We thought
they'd be hopeless," Adam Hollioake, who captained Surrey to the trophy
in the inaugural Twenty20 Cup, recalled. That mindset permeated the
format's early years: it took until the third men's T20 international
for any team to pick a frontline spinner.

Instead, spin has become a pivotal feature of the T20 game: spinners
bowled a record 41.7% of overs in the 2023 IPL - compared to just 23.2%
in 2008 - and four of the top five wicket-takers in the format's history
are spinners, with Dwayne Bravo the only exception. Every top T20 team
features either a wristspinner or a mystery spinner, with the ability to
turn the ball both ways.

With five fielders stationed on the boundary, spinners' margin for error
is far greater in T20 than in Tests. As R Ashwin has suggested, "Six well-constructed bad balls could be the way to go forward in T20
cricket." The format has revolutionised the way legspin is bowled too:
there are more modern spinners who resemble Anil Kumble than they do
Shane Warne, with shorter average lengths and faster, flatter
trajectories in vogue - as modelled by Rashid Khan.

Spinners who bowl out of the front of the hand have come in and out of
fashion. They largely disappeared after the ICC cracked down on suspect actions, but are on the rise again: at this World Cup, expect Akeal
Hosein, Mitchell Santner and Maheesh Theekshana to bowl seam-up
deliveries that drift into right-handers with the new ball.
Same difference: Lasith Malinga's action has inspired a generation of
bowlers, most notably Sri Lanka's Matheesha Pathirana

Same difference: Lasith Malinga's action has inspired a generation of
bowlers, most notably Sri Lanka's Matheesha Pathirana Sajjad Hussain / © AFP/Getty Images

Unorthodox is the new orthodox
The T20 era has normalised the abnormal, especially when it comes to
fast bowling. Seamers with low, slingy trajectories or idiosyncratic
actions have proved particularly valuable in the modern era: Lasith
Malinga was the outstanding fast bowler of T20's first decade, and his
former Mumbai Indians team-mate Jasprit Bumrah has taken that mantle on
in the past ten years.

Malinga's action was once considered unique but his success has spawned
a generation of imitators: Sri Lanka's Nuwan Thushara and Pakistan's
Zaman Khan also use low-arm, slingshot actions, while Matheesha
Pathirana - dubbed "Baby Malinga" - is his protégé, and has regularly
ripped stumps out at the IPL.

We'll take it slow
Dwayne Bravo, the format's all-time leading wicket-taker, has led the
way when it comes to variations: towards the end of his career he would
often bowl 20 slower balls in a four-over spell. Every multi-format fast
bowler now has at least one slower ball, and often two or three:
offcutters, legcutters, back-of-the-hand deliveries or knuckleballs.

Some T20 specialists - such as Ravi Bopara - have reached the stage
where they exclusively bowl "change-ups". Benny Howell, the English
allrounder, defies categorisation: his ESPNcricinfo profile describes
his bowling as "right-arm medium" but he labels himself a "fast spinner"
and has flippantly claimed to have 50 different deliveries in his armoury.
Rope me in: boundary relay catches, where the fielder throws the ball
back into play for a team-mate to complete, have become the norm

Rope me in: boundary relay catches, where the fielder throws the ball
back into play for a team-mate to complete, have become the norm Mike
Egerton / © PA Photos/Getty Images

Fielders of our dreams
Watch highlights of any game from the 20th century and you will be
struck by the standard of fielding - and not in a good way. You'd be
lucky to see anyone sliding along the outfield, trying to prevent a
boundary. More often, fielders escort the ball like bodyguards, keeping
their distance.

Things improved as the game professionalised but there has been a marked
change in the modern era. "T20 triggered a real momentum shift in
fielding and the attitudes around it," Paul Collingwood has observed.
Relay catches are now so common that ESPNcricinfo's scorecards note both fielders involved. Most teams practise relays immediately before a game.

Only a handful of players can get away with being "hidden" in the field,
and the change is most notable with fast bowlers. In a previous
generation, they could hardly hide their disdain for the entire craft;
now, even 6ft 7in Reece Topley can be found taking screamers at short
fine leg in the IPL. When the BBL ran a poll of the best catches of the
2023-24 season earlier this year, all four involved Michael Neser.
Colourful in whites: inventive shots no longer raise an eyebrow in Test
cricket

Colourful in whites: inventive shots no longer raise an eyebrow in Test
cricket © Getty Images

Keep up, will ya
The early days of T20 prompted a theory that the format would bring
about a resurgence of specialist wicketkeepers, picked for their glove
work more than their batting. In reality, it has gone the other way,
with keepers generally involved in only a handful of balls per innings,
most teams are content putting a part-timer or a stopper behind the
stumps, so long as they can contribute substantially with the bat.

Keepers have become increasingly innovative, with a general shift from
soft hands to strong hands in their technique. MS Dhoni's lightning-fast
hands and no-look run-outs have led the way - no wicketkeeper has more dismissals in the format - but standards have shot up: just watch
Heinrich Klaasen's recent stumping of Shikhar Dhawan while stood up to Bhuvneshwar Kumar for proof.



Relive Heinrich Klaasen's brilliant piece of stumping

Watch the match LIVE on @StarSportsIndia and @JioCinema #TATAIPL | #PBKSvSRH | @SunRisers pic.twitter.com/sRCc0zM9df
— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) April 9, 2024

Do we match up?
The terminology is new, even if the idea is not: in the 1932-33 Ashes,
Douglas Jardine realised that hostile fast bowling was the best match-up
for Donald Bradman. In any format of the game, but particularly in limited-overs cricket, captains have always tried to use their bowlers
at the best possible time; and batting pairs have always tried to ensure
that the right batter is on strike against the right bowler. But T20 has fundamentally changed the way captains think, with their decisions now
seen primarily through the lens of resource deployment.

Statistical evidence increasingly supports the long-established theory
that batters find it much easier to play balls that spin into them than
those that turn away. "If you are a fingerspinner - a left-arm spinner
or an offspinner - you need to know how to turn the ball the other way
for teams to have the confidence to play you as a genuine bowler,"
Dinesh Karthik has observed.

It has also accelerated the role of data analysis: every T20 dugout in
the world will feature at least one analyst - if not two or three -
whose influence may be far greater than many realise. The use of data
has enhanced the sport, generally backing up the instincts of the most attacking players: "People talk about taking risks all the time, and T20 cricket being so risky," Eoin Morgan said in Cricket 2.0. "[But]
naturally, you don't take as high a risk as you should, and as data
tells you to."
Put (no) price on your wicket: batters are scoring with more freedom now

Put (no) price on your wicket: batters are scoring with more freedom now
Noah Seelam / © AFP/Getty Images

Wickets are cheap
Perhaps the single biggest difference between 50-over and 20-over
cricket is the value of a single wicket. Around one-third of ODI innings culminate in a team being bowled out but in T20Is, the equivalent figure
is around one-fifth. The principal effect has been predictable,
liberating batters to attack much more with much less concern about the prospect of losing their wicket. Virat Kohli, for example, is dismissed
once every 63 balls in ODIs but once every 37 balls in T20Is.

The contrast has had some intriguing consequences. Increasingly often,
it can actually suit bowling teams to keep a struggling batter at the
crease. In 2014, Yuvraj Singh made 11 off 21 balls in the T20 World Cup
final, limiting MS Dhoni to only seven balls and leaving Suresh Raina
unused entirely; Sri Lanka cruised to their target of 131 with 13 balls
to spare. The recent counter has been teams placing such a low value on
wickets that they are comfortable retiring batters out. R Ashwin, as so
often, set the trend.

Luck of the coin
Once the simplest part of any game, the toss has increasingly
convoluted, and at times has seemed to determine the outcomes of whole tournaments. In the era of the impact player, IPL captains walk out to
the toss with two separate team sheets and name a different XI depending
on whether they are batting or bowling first; in the BBL, the
traditional coin has been replaced by a novelty bat flip.

But the real change at the toss is its outsized ability to influence
results in T20, particularly in floodlit games where conditions change significantly from one innings to the next. There is a slight bias in
favour of chasing teams across T20 history but in certain tournaments
there has been a clear sense of "win the toss, win the game": at the T20
World Cup in the UAE in 2021, chasing teams won 22 out of 33 floodlit
matches from the Super 12s stage onwards, including all three knockout
games. Australia, the eventual champions, won the toss in all six of
their victories; the only time they lost the toss, they were thrashed by England in Dubai.

20-20 vision
T20's influence on the modern game has been clear across formats. In
2003, Test matches saw 3.20 runs per over and 36.33 runs per wicket; by
2023, runs were scored at a quicker rate (3.52 runs per over) and
wickets fell more regularly (32.50 runs per wicket). The comparison is a
little murkier in ODIs, where playing conditions have changed
significantly, but scoring rates have jumped from 4.67 runs per over in
2003 to 5.54 runs per over in 2023.

Many of Test cricket's best moments in the past five years have been
tied inextricably to skills honed in T20: consider Ben Stokes'
reverse-sweeping during his 135 not out against Australia at Headingley
in 2019, or Jasprit Bumrah's stunning yorker and slower ball to Ollie
Pope and Ben Foakes respectively in Visakhapatnam earlier this year.
Even those purists who refuse to watch T20 itself are still watching a
game shaped by it.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)