Asian Window

In The Times, UK, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Chief Cricket Correspondent:

Cricket is in ferment again. It often is, but the first thing to understand about what we had better now call the Twenty20 Revolution is that it will not supersede Test cricket.

I keep reading that “cricket is the new football”. That is odd because that was what was being said in 2005, when the Ashes series was gripping a wider than usual proportion of the British public, just as last year’s ICC World Twenty20 tournament in South Africa captivated much of India’s vast population or the explosive fast bowling of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson enthused Australians, among them Kerry Packer, in 1974-75.

Cricket’s popularity ebbs and flows, like the game itself, but it keeps flowing. Not because it is the new football, but because it is the old cricket, a series of duels between a batsman and a bowler in a team context and varying conditions, a game demanding as much skill, fitness and courage as most others and greater discipline, technique and intelligence than any.

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