Mr. Ponting said:
True, I have never seen one, ok.
But I fail to understand your logic when you say "To succeed in 20-20 cricket, you need to be an excellent batsman, while in 50-over rubbish, just about any incompetent seems able to do well."
Surely in 20-20 cricket all the batsmen have to do is hit the hell out of the ball? (Obviously there are exceptions)
You are coming up with all the objections and criticisms which I came up with before I'd seen any 20-20 cricket.
Then I watched some 20-20 games on the TV last year, and realised I was wrong about nearly everything.
Maintaining an S/R of about 80/100 balls is relatively easy - lots of incompetents can knock singles around and whack the odd boundary here and there, especially off part-time bowlers.
But in 20-20, you can easily afford to have 2 or 3 non-batting bowlers who can be the real deal, not just dibby-dobby medium pacers who can bat a bit, so there are fewer part-time bowlers to clobber, and less opportunity for unskilled batsmen. If a single is a failure and a dot ball a disaster, then a wicket is a double disaster because not only have you failed to score off nearly 1% of your allotted batting time, but it's a pound to a penny that you'll have to concede another dot ball for the new batsman, and that's 1.5% of your batting down the drain. Do that 9 times in an innings and you've lost about a seventh of your opportunity - in 50-over cricket, losing all your wickets takes up about a seventeenth of your time.
In fact, maintaining the kind of strike rate you want, ie 150+, is very difficult to do over a longish period like 45 balls. The slow bowlers are especially deadly because they toss it up with no pace on the ball and try to turn it, the batsmen are just about compelled to try and leather it, and the spinner ends up with 3-26 off his four overs, which is an excellent return.
In Test cricket, the unit of currency is basically the session - if you win more sessions than you lose, you win the match, roughly speaking. In 50-over cricket, the unit is the over. In 20-20, it's the ball, and that concentrates the mind wonderfully.
There is no room for passengers in a 20-20 side, no room for lapses of concentration, no time to recover lost ground.
In fact, 20-20 has the virtues which people have been trying to convince me abound in 50-over cricket but which I've seen only very rarely in that slow, dreary and bloated form of the game.
Cheers,
Mike
