The changing face of cricket

Get on board for the ride

Fazeer Mohammed

June 23, 2008

	Dwayne Bravo takes the unorthodox route during West Indies' Twenty20 match against Australia © Trinidad and Tobago Express

Not that there is anything revolutionary about this global trend, except that the all-encompassing influence of saturated media coverage has accelerated the haste with which sport, like any other endeavour in the public domain, seeks to pander to the whims and fancies of an increasingly fickle audience.

I was going to say indecent haste, but really, there is really nothing unusual anymore to see norms and conventions cast aside, not so much because they are fundamentally flawed, but for the financially relevant fact that they get in the way of giving the public what they want.

It's said that a picture paints a thousand words, and Robert Taylor's photo of Dwayne Bravo in gloriously unrestrained swiping mode on the back page of last Saturday's Express requires more than a single column to properly digest in the context of the rush by all and sundry to embrace Twenty20 cricket.

At another time and in another place, such a full-blooded shot - complete with the bat left in only one hand while the head cranes skywards to follow the trajectory of the extravagant miscue somewhere over backward-point - would have been a source of embarrassment, especially for an all-rounder of international calibre. Now, especially as the Bravo led West Indies to victory over Australia in the rain-reduced Twenty20 match at Kensington Oval, it is the quintessential image of this enormously popular version of the game.

'By any means necessary' is our modern mantra, especially if there is a truckload of money waiting to be offloaded by some generous investor desperately keen to be identified with the rise of this new hybrid as a globally lucrative phenomenon. See how West Indian and English officials, all with the pupils of their eyes replaced by dollar signs as in those old cartoons, are following happily in the wake of Allen Stanford?

Not a discouraging word can be heard from any administrator of note, so dazed are they all at the prospect of being showered with manna from the heavenly fortune of Stanford. His utterances now carry enormous weight among the cricketing cognoscenti, whether or not they make any sense, simply because his net worth represents an irrefutable position in their glassy eyes.

Now rivalling Stanford as a subject of fawning adulation, although of a different kind, is Kevin Pietersen. Although it is not entirely unprecedented (I recall reading how New Zealand batsman Craig McMillan once tried it without great success), his lashing of Scott Styris for two sixes, having switched instantaneously from a right-handed to a left-handed batsman for successive deliveries in an ODI eight days ago, are being widely hailed with all the fanfare associated with the first time man set foot on the moon.

	Kevin Pietersen brings out his flamboyant switch-hit © Getty Images

By the way, even though it is now being referred to as cricket's version of baseball's switch-hit, my understanding is that batters in baseball cannot change from right to left-handed, or vice-versa, while the pitcher is in his wind-up, unless they are willing to run the risk of decapitation.

Despite acknowledging the challenge presented in the interpretation of the lbw rule and other regulations, an MCC spokesman offered ringing endorsement on the basis of the doltish assertion that "while bowlers must inform umpires and batsmen of their mode of delivery, they do not provide a warning of the type of delivery that they will bowl. It [MCC] therefore concludes that the batsman should have the opportunity-should they wish-of executing the 'switch-hit' stroke".

Then again, cricket has always been a batsman's game, even more so as its duration gets shorter and shorter. Pietersen is not breaking any rule, because the rules of the game as presently constituted never envisaged a batsman switching his stance as the bowler approached. But rather than discourage further switching, at least until the regulations are amended to accommodate it, the MCC goes with the flow on the basis that it is exciting for cricket.

Entertainment first, fairness a distant second.

Fazeer Mohammed is a writer and broadcaster in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad

© Trinidad & Tobago Express

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Players/Umpires

Dwayne Bravo

Kevin Pietersen

Teams

West Indies