Twenty20 has that Grand National appeal
The Daily Telegraph, 21st June 2009
The Twenty20 World Cup, which comes to a climax tomorrow, has been a triumph. Why? Not only because the cricket has been exciting, but also because it has been so unpredictable. Australia went out in the first round, the champions India didn’t make the semi-finals, Netherlands beat England and now the mercurial Pakistan have thumped a dominant South Africa.
Everyone loves an upset – well, except for the favourites – and surprise is at the heart of Twenty20’s appeal.
Sport is a form of entertainment, and uncertainty makes it more entertaining. Does anyone really want to watch Brazil win every football World Cup and Australia win every cricket tournament? Of course not. We crave giant killers, upsets, shock results and the triumph of the underdog. Twenty20 has given us the full set.
It is not knowing what will happen next that makes us switch on the television. Tennis is enjoying its most golden spell in living memory precisely because there is no single all-conquering player. There is not only the inspiring rivalry between Nadal and Federer, but a brilliant chasing pack: Murray, Verdasco, del Potro and Djokovich.
Rugby has often been criticized for being a game prone to bullying domination rather than backstreet underdogs. But the last World Cup was enhanced by Argentina’s surprising journey to the semi-finals – and for the fact that France knocked out the highly fancied All Blacks.
Uncertainty is also at the core of the romance of the British Lions. How quickly can Lions players, who are more used to fierce enmity when they play against each other in the Six Nations, turn into committed allies? Can a scratch team gel quickly enough to beat an established national side like South Africa? Is the Southern Hemisphere game too far ahead of the Northern?
One reason why football is the world’s favourite game is that low-scoring sports make upsets more likely. Where would the soccer World Cup be without an underdog triumph? Who wants an FA Cup without giant-killers?
This is the problem with the Premier League. You have to go back to Blackburn Rovers in 1994-5 for the last upset – every Premiership since then has been won by Chelsea, Arsenal or Manchester United. It has become a mini-league within a league, and far less interesting as a result.
There is a paradox here. Professional sports teams are determined to ‘leave nothing to chance’ – they plan rigorously, train hard and study opposition weaknesses. But the enduring spectacle of sport relies on them not be able to eliminate chance altogether. The magic of sport relies us on know knowing how the story will end.
Of course, there must be a balance in all sports between fairness and uncertainty. If the better team always wins, sport becomes boring. But if sport becomes purely a lottery – if, say, a tennis match was decided by a single tie-breaker or a cricket match by a one-over slog – then the result becomes devalued. Twenty20 treads this tightrope between the dramatic and the silly. In this tournament, the drama has outweighed the silliness.
But with Twenty20 it is always a close run thing. The game’s intrinsic unpredictability is great for spectators, but not so easy for players and coaches. This was especially true in the case of England’s defeat at the hands of West Indies. It’s not that the Duckworth Lewis is unfair. But any game shortened to nine overs is much more open to chance than a full Twenty20. England weren’t robbed, they were simply more exposed to randomness.
Much of the media’s analysis of Twenty20 doesn’t take this into account. It’s very easy to say, ‘They’re up for this one,’ when a team is on top. But being ‘up for it’ doesn’t determine the outcome of Twenty20 matches. It is taking risks – risks that come off – which matters. And because the risks are large, the degree of unpredictability is enormous.
This explains how can England play so well one day and so badly the next. “England are the new Pakistan”, as David Lloyd put it, comparing England to the famously volatile subcontinent team.
In truth, Twenty20 makes Pakistans out of everyone. Middlesex won last year’s domestic Twety20, but haven’t won a game so far this season. Rajasthan, the poorest of the IPL franchises, romped to victory last year. It was down to the genius of Shane Warne, everyone said. But Warne was still captain again this year, while Rajasthan came sixth out of eight.
India won the Twenty20 World Cup in 2007, and many of us fancied them to do so again in England. But for a few overs they got their tactics wrong against England – where was Yuvraj? – and crashed out of the tournament.
In other words, Twenty20 is turning into the Grand National: impossible to predict. Far better just to enjoy the show, keep your money in your pocket – and not to read too much into the result.