The Overlord has demanded better statistics from IPL arguing essentially that T20 is a completely different form of the game. Ashok Malik has made the same argument in a slightly different context,
In the vintage years of Test cricket, boundaries were occasional. One-day cricket (F50 if you prefer) made fours and sixes common. T20 threatens to make them commonplace. If a six is hit every other over it is going to cease to be exciting. T20/IPL will need to devise new benchmarks. Perhaps vertical targets will be set: “Hit the red line near the clubhouse balcony and score eight; hit that black line on the floodlight tower and score a 12.”
Agreed, both those sound ridiculous, but so much about T20 is out of the ordinary and the conventional that it will soon have separate rules and scoring patterns being institutionalised for it. You can’t play it as if it were a compressed version of an ODI or a Test; it’s not. You don’t write text messages in accordance with Wren and Martin rules of grammar, do you?
What these fine gentlemen (Overlord undoubtedly is the finer one) are arguing is that T20 isn’t just an artificially shortened form of test cricket. For T20 to thrive, it would require innovative thinking including new metrics to assess performance. But the crucial question is this:Does T20 demand players of entirely different skill sets? It may still be cricket but is it simply impossible for a test player to automatically transfer his skills to this format? Is that an explanation for the relative failure of batsmen like Rahul Drabid, Kaliis, Laxman and Ganguly?
This question is interesting because Rahul Dravid has been accused of packing his team with test players. And that is apparently why his Bangalore team is languishing at the bottom of the points table. Siddartha Vaidyanathan, discussing Bangalore’s troubles has this interesting little story,
After the first round of auction in Mumbai, a few friends congratulated me on my Test team,” Vijay Mallya, the franchise owner, said before the IPL. ” I mentioned this to our captain Dravid and he laughed it off and told me that Test cricket is the ultimate test for any cricketer and if a player can do well in that format, then he can do well in all other formats, be it one-day matches or Twenty20.
Vaidyanathan opines that ”this theory has been torn apart.” While it would be easy enough to point out that some other teams packed with powerhitters, Hyderabad for example, are not doing too well either, it is clear that teams with bit-and-pieces players have performed well in IPL. Rajasthan led by an inspirational captain would be a classic example. Even Mumbai’s floundering campaign has been rescued by a set of rookies.
But Dravid is not entirely wrong. Test cricket is the ultimate format of the game (at least for an old-fashioned fan like me) and you would expect cricketers who have survived the rigors of test cricket to do well in T20 too. What, in my opinion, Dravid underestimated is how much the administrators have changed the rules of the game to favor the batsmen: apart from the ridiculous limit of four overs per bowler, the boundaries have been shortened to ICC minimum limits–mishits have regularly resulted in sixes. What this has done is to level the playing field (no pun intended) between a classically accomplished batsman like Dravid and a new upstart who may not be blessed with Dravid’s technical virtuosity but knows how to hit the ball hard and is unafraid to take risks. Or the pitches which have largely been featherbeds. To give an example, If you take an extremely hard exam like JEE, and reduce it to a sufficiently low standards, the difference between someone who has worked really hard and someone who is giving it just for the heck of it will narrow.(1) The former may yet beat the latter but in the case of T20, the format is simply too short for these finer distinctions to be made.
To be fair, cricket administrators have been trying to make the game more batsmen friendly for the last two decades. The limited number of bouncers, shortened boundaries, designer pitches have all helped make the quality gap between a Dravid and a Yusuf Pathan irrelevant. A genius like Tendulkar may be immune to such changes but for less naturally gifted players like Dravid, it makes their job much harder. T20 has simply taken this to the next level.
Unfortunately, T20 is all about fours and sixes–at least, from the spectators point of view which is all that really matters. From that perspective, Dravid certainly made a few errors while selecting his team.
p.s Not that I particularly care about T20. All I hope is when the real cricket starts, Laxman can still hit those beautiful cover drives, Dravid can continue to stonewall as if there is no tomorrow, Ganguly can still place the ball between the third slip and the gully, and Tendulkar can be, well, Tendulkar.
1. When the Supreme Court ordered that even reserved category students would have to clear minimum qualifying marks, this is what the U.P government did. It lowered the standard of the its entrance exams so much that unless you did not know how to read and write, you could not fail to score the minimum 40% required for admission.
) but I have to agree with Sen here. Not only because there is no upper limit for elitism–I enjoy one day cricket; someone like Kesvan might think only test cricket is real cricket. But simply because as a mass sport, cricket cannot afford to be elitist. Why should the views of 
