If twenty20 cricket and rugby sevens are the future, then please explain golf

Somerset playing Trinidad and Tobago in Bangalore. It sounds like the fulfillment of a dream in world cricket. It’s day five of the inaugural Champions League bringing together twelve club or provincial teams from seven countries.

It’s the first viable attempt at a world club championship of cricket after several false starts (hands up who remembers the 2001 one-day series at the WACA, brokered unsuccessfully by Dean Jones). And what has made it viable? A transformation of the sport into a truncated format. Twenty overs per side, a whole game played in unorthodox fashion at a fast(ish) pace, and all over in roughly the same time it takes to play a game of baseball.

Twenty20 cricket is perceived as the Great Cash Cow of the sport. Through the Champions League and the Indian Premier League, it has attracted big money from the emerging Indian economy and is being sold as the great hope to push the game to new horizons, especially China but also the near-impregnable USA.

Notwithstanding cricket’s current unwinnable spat with the World Anti-Drug Agency (WADA), the dream is for 20-20 cricket to become an Olympic sport, either in the year of the same name, or in an Olympiad soon afterwards.

Bold-faced capitalism is currently winning the day and threatening to devour the 50-over one-day game. But is the truncation of a sport the road to a global future? Judgimg by recent decisions made by the International Olympic Committee, the answer is not necessarily yes.

Rugby union is returning to the Olympics at Rio de Janeiro in 2016 after a 92-year absence, but with seven players on each side, not fifteen. Unlike Twenty20, rugby sevens is no flash-in-the-pan, having grown over time from an annual long weekend in Hong Kong. There exists a rugby sevens world circuit carefully managed by the International Rugby Board, but with no sense that it threatens to take over from the fifteens as the main form of the sport.

The sevens has made a measured rise in the world arena, having been a part of the Commonwealth Games since 1998. Its selection for Rio has been widely accepted (unless, of course, you play softball).

Golf’s return to the Olympics in Rio comes after a 112-year hiatus, and was received somewhat divisively. It certainly doesn’t need the Games to lift its profile. What’s more, it doesn’t feel the need to trim itself down for Rio.

I’m sure I was far from being the only person expecting 21st century olympic golf to be an 18-hole matchplay knockout. But no, it’s the full Monty (or at least the full Tiger). A full four days, 72 holes of strokeplay.

And on that note, back to the cricket Five days of Test cricket is, we are told, too long, too slow, its subtle strategies just too obscure. The Americans, to whose dollar we cringe, are too hungry for action and non-stop thrills to tolerate something as long and slow as five-day cricket.

We’re too reluctant to sell five-day cricket to the world, meanwhile we cheerfully embrace four-day golf. Please explain.

Attachment includes the note and its objects

Ponting’s T20 workload increases after T20 retirement

Ricky Ponting will play more Twenty20 cricket in 2010 than in 2009 despite his announcement on Monday of his retirement from the three-hour version of the game at international level.

Ponting made the announcement at an airport press conference before departing for the UK to rejoin the Australian ODI team. He cited the desire to spend more time with hos family, plus an intention to extend his longevity as a Test and ODI player and captain.

While Ponting will be absent from all international Twenty20 fixtures for Australia, including the 2010 ICC World Twenty20 in the West Indies, he will turn out for the Kolkata Knight Riders in next year’s Indian Premier League.

It will be the final year of a three-year contract with the Shah Rukh Khan-owned franchise, although he stood aside from the 2009 IPL because of Australia’s heavy international program.

KKR are expected to play fourteen T20 games in next year’s IPL, rising to sixteen if they reach the final, which will qualify them for further matches in the 2010 T20 Champions League. Ponting would be based in Kolkata for appoximately two months for the duration of IPL3.

Ponting has also left the door open to appear for the Tasmanian Tigers in the domestic T20 “KFC Big Bash”

Ponting bows out of international Twenty20 on a dismal note, leaving Michael Clarke with the legacy of a team seeded behind Bangladesh for next year’s ICCWT20.

There has been no indication that Ponting will step down as Test captain’ despite having lost three of his last five series and becoming the first Australian skipper since the 19th century to surrender the Ashes.

Whether the rearrangement of his Twenty20 duties reinvigorates his Test leadership is a matter that remains to be seen.

Test 5.17

“This time the only blood has come from the burst blisters of England’s bowlers, who laboured throughout 181 overs and who could only indulge in any celebrations when each of them reached their hundreds – of runs conceded. All five of their main men achieved that odious landmark, perversely shaking one another’s hands when they did so.”

- Vic Marks, The Observer, 12.7.09

It’s one thing for us armchair nincompoops to take the piss whenever a bowler concedes his hundred runs for the innings. For the bowlers themselves to make light of the occasion with the full complicity of the captain, as we saw at the Gerddi Soffia on Saturday, was ridiculous.

Of course, England’s whole performance during Australia’s innings of 674 for 6 was ridiculous – up there, perhaps beyond, Trent Bridge 1989. They played like a team that had simply given up. However big the despair, the dumbfounding frivolity of Jimmy Anderson (32-6-110-2), Stuart Broad (32-6-129-1), Graeme Swann (38-8-131-0), Andrew Flintoff (35-3-128-1) and Monty Panesar (35-4-115-1) is unbelievable among professional sportspeople.

None of this should diminish the efforts of Marcus North and Brad Haddin. The hallmark of the best Australian teams of the last decade or so has been their extraordinary depth and reserves in batting, and here we have it again, even though Haddin is no Gilchrist with the gloves.

Only 49 overs bowled on Saturday, so I awarded partial votes for the Midwinter-Midwinter: 2 pts to Brad Haddin, 1 pt to Marcus North.

Though I was tempted to give an honourable mention to Steve Harmison for his 5-60 for Durham against Yorkshire.

For my Sunday selection of five takes on the game, I really must begin at the Scum of the Earth News of the World.

Getting past the distraction of Lily Allen’s third nipple, we find the much promised “Read KP exclusively in the News of the World”. By, as the article tells us, Sam Peters.

“This isn’t the most important Test match of the summer”, says Kev-as-told-to-Sam. (He doesn’t specify what is. Maybe it was the Lord’s Test against the West Indies.) “The Australians are here until September 20 and they are not going anywhere,” adds St Kevin of Pietermaritzburg in tautological moment the late Alex Buzo would have been proud of.

And as for his dismissal in the first innings, “If it hadn’t hit my head then it would have gone down to fine leg and I would have gone on to 70-odd. ” So there you have it, don’t sweep outside off when you have a head as big as Kevin Pietersen’s.

Also at Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday comic book extraordinaire is the deep insightful analysis of Richie Benaud, or, as they call him at the Notw, Richie Benaud the voice of cricket. Blogging at SBS is Greg Matthews. On Thursday he described Simon Katich as the “Uluru of Australian cricket”. Does that mean self-indulgent eco-tourists should stop climbing all over him?

Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph has Malcolm Conn and, doing a weekly diary while leading a tour group to the UK, none other than Kerry O’Keeffe.

Thanks to an overexuberant webindexing spider (hello Yahoo!) rickeyre.com has exceeded its bandwidth for March 2009. It will be back online from April 1, 2009 at (I think) 4pm Sydney time.

It’s a tragic day when any spotr degenerates to this level. When it’s the Serie A you wonder what the road back is.

Daily Telegraph (Sydney)
06 Jan 2007

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Daily Telegraph (Sydney)
03 Jan 2007