Whippet: the next big thing in cricket

Those who love the sport of cricket, love it with uncommon passion. They love everything about cricket: the nuances, the idiosyncrasies, the enigma called the pitch, the works. Until recently, the sport was played only in England and its erstwhile colonies; there wasn’t any exposure to the sport many countries around the world. The trouble with cricket has been its five-day duration with breaks for lunch, tea, and drinks. For most people, no matter what the sport, a game should reasonably end in an hour or two. This 5-day long rigmarole was plainly too arduous to hold much appeal. Still worse was the possibility that the game could very well end undecided—no winner, no loser, that is.

Cricket was a hard sell to countries that did not have the sport in the DNA sequences of its people. It was a lot easier for old loyal within the British Commonwealth countries to get their younger lot excited about it, its dispersion beyond the countries’ boundaries was far more challenging. The spectator’s money was noticeably moving to football in England, to all other sports in Australia, to athletics in West Indies and to Bollywood movies in India. Pakistan? Well, one didn’t know then, and doesn’t know now, what their people spend their money on. Alternate entertainment choices being absent, Pakistanis went on loving the sport. 

Gravely concerned at watching cricket die a slow death, all and sundry pitched in with ideas ranging from imaginative to diabolical. The diversity among these contributors ran from corporate executives to street side vendors. All along, the key result areas of this human effort have been, (a) turning the sport into a crowd puller, (b) all, including Tokelau, Samoa, Kiribati and Tonga, starting from this side of the International Date Line, should play it, and (c) generate more and more cash to make (a) and (b) possible. Noble sentiments, no doubt. Mission thus stated, we had ODIs, which to some extent rekindled consumer interest. Not satisfied with reducing cricket to a one-day game, a 3-hour brash-dash version we know as T20 was introduced. Sri Lanka and New Zealand applied their minds on transforming the sport’s shorter analogs by inventing strategies and tactics at the action end. Those were often followed by some teams and found ineffective by the other teams.

That effort achieved successful inclusion of teams from some countries, e.g. Kenya, Angola, Ireland, Namibia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Canada and some more.

Not satiated with the moolah the sport generated, the administrators’ invented franchised leagues. The first of those, the IPL, leaned on the marketing wizardry of the United States, and threw in pretty cheerleaders with colorful costumes and live music to turn the games into carnivals. Australia came up with their own Big Bash. South Africa has its CSA T20. There now are Caribbean CPL, Pakistan Super League and Bangladesh’s BPL. Don’t be surprised if Gibraltar launches a Peninsular Premier League tomorrow. 

Many a mind are still at work.

The England and Wales Cricket Board plans on bringing in another variation called “The Hundred,” which would limit each team’s innings to 100 balls. That’s even shorter than a T20 game. If it seems like the horrifying limit to bowdlerizing, you would be wrong. Its nadir was reached some years ago when Hong Kong International Sixes was introduced. This one called for six-a-side teams bowling five overs each and finishing the jing-bang in less than an hour.

The kilter, however, keeps growing with new ideas from all corners of the world. But I say, all good. More the minds, more the flights of imagination. For inspiration, they could even look at the cricket they play in Ganjari village’s close-to-nature, dusty ground an hour outside of Varanasi in India. Ganjari has everything—a cow carcass beside the road and a stand further down selling samosas.

The problems is that no matter what form the sport takes, it calls for tweaking the rules with mind boggling regularity. But, lest it should look like pitcher-friendly baseball, all changes are for making it yet more batsman-friendly slam bang events. Bowlers, it would appear, have no guardians in ICC. It has gone to a stage when teams readily score 350 plus scores in a 50-over game. Why, England scored 484 the other day without looking enervated. Incidentally, most countries would consider giving their batsmen national awards if their batsmen regularly notched up that number in an innings of the 5-day Test cricket version. For bowlers, it has gone to the horrendous limit where it is not easy to differentiate between Ling chi—the Chinese torture also known as ‘slow slicing’ or a death by thousand cuts—and the way bowler is treated by the batsmen in plain view of thousands. I hear PETA is considering suing ICC for cruelty on humans (read bowlers).

So hold your breath; my augury is that there shall be some new rules to reduce that unholy assault on the bowlers. Guys, it is confounding the way the sport keeps on evolving, and I feel that’s not the word I was looking for. But, I am certain, you get my drift. Let me put it this way; If you haven’t watched T20 in last twelve months because you decided on a scientific expedition to Antarctica, and came back to watch it in 2018, you don’t have a hope in hell to associate cricket, as you knew, with what you are seeing on the screen.  

Yet, on the other side of the spectrum, the way experts enter into the test cricket–no test cricket debate is amusing. When a particular test match manifests both teams angling for one up on the other and the momentum reverses some overs later, all administrators and commentators site it as an example of what test matches are all about. It is conveniently forgotten that all teams play not to lose. And if that takes the game to a frightfully dull ordeal, they will indulge in it: and rightfully too. The high level rhetoric of saving the Test cricket takes a distant back seat. And in that process if the pumps that shoot adrenalin up have gone kaput: Too bad. A clarion call for “the spirit of the game” is ignored: and that, rightfully too. It just is in the nature of the beast called Test matches.

The dilemma sets you thinking. Do we need some sequestering here? I mean the shorter forms of the sport can only be called cricket for the reason that they are played with a bat and a ball. It’s a far cry from Test cricket, where limits on how long a team can bat are affected by things like the players’ skill level, the nature of pitch or the weather.

It’s time we should differentiate between cricket and its variants in a decisive manner. I suggest Test Match sport be rechristened Stickit for it calls for sticking it out–the sentiment applies to players as well as to the watching public. T20 should be called Midget for that is what it is. Six-a-side sport is Bickett for it obviously a game with no style, and an utter absurdity. That leaves ODI; it is best called Thicket indicating that it is some kind of a gob or lump that is hard to swallow.  

That settled, I feel I too should be allowed the liberty of inventing a new form of the sport in the genre of cricket. I mean I too want to throw my hat into the pool of crowd-sourced wisdom.

I won’t call my sport “Fifties” along the lines of England’s “Hundreds”, the reason being it is unimaginative and boring. My sport shall be a 50-balls-a-side game. It shall have 10 balls to an over, 5-over game with only 5 allowed to bat, and bowlers will get to bowl one over each. It shall be a 90 minute game. And, for no other reason but to make it different, the ball this time shall be colored indigo blue. To make it yet more coffer-jangling, all teams shall also have women players. One could name the sport Blue Ball T5 or BBT5, but in keeping with search for words rhyming with Cricket, it should be called Whippet. The word, incidentally, stands for a thin long-legged breed of dog used for racing.

The master craftsmen of IPL jamboree can also introduce this sport as Club Whippet. They should plan on creating some more franchises–32 seems like a good number. Those shall be divided into eight pools of four teams each – a la Football World Cup with round of 16, quarter finals, semifinals and finals. The teams shall have five domestic players, three foreign players and 3 women players. That hoopla can’t be bettered, I daresay.

Whippet, then.