WT20's place at the top table?

I always find it useful when discussing Twenty20 to find out exactly what camp someone sits in before they start! It's not to pre-judge their opinions based upon my view of these camps, more to understand why they make the points they do. To clarify, I think there are three main camps: Traditionalist, Modernist, InBetweenist! OK, so I need a new name for the third but that'll do for now.

To work within my own guidelines, I confess I'm the third, as yet poorly defined, category. Traditionalists and Modernist are fairly easy to understand; one prefers Test Matches and views anything other as 'not quite cricket'. The other [modernist] aligns their wants of cricket to more contemporary sports such as football and rugby, where pace, entertainment and gladiatorial power are more sort after commodities than grace, tactical acumen and polite sportsmanship. Neither I believe to be right or wrong, which I guess explains why I find myself in the middle of the two!

I've always liked Test Match cricket. When people ask why I like Cricket in general, I've always referred to sitting outside on a sunny summer's day, watching sport and drinking beer! I like the pace of the game and the gentleness of its appearance. Like most cricket forms I also enjoy the fact that the most drama or mediocre of matches all unfold the same way: bowler runs up and delivers. From there anything can and often does happen. Listening to Cricket commentary it so often appears that the bowler is in charge. They set the field, dictate the line and length of the ball and can make the ball leave the hand with subtle, yet effective variations. However this does not keep a good batsman down for long! The battle between batsman and bowler is the most fascinating part of cricket and at its most prevalent during test match cricket.

I will also admit that I viewed Twenty20 cricket with an element of disdain. Not because I'm incapable of being a modernist, or accepting of change in the game, because I don't think I'm guilty on either count. My main objection was that the introduction of 'ugly' cricket shots as the norm in this particular format of the game. I felt it was unnecessary to promote elements of batting that required little skill. I've since climbed down on that particular remark as I do appreciate the hand/eye co-ordination and sheer power required to slog the ball to the boundary! Improvisation (for example, Dilshan's Scoop) I'm all for, but the slogging element does still erk me. My other negative thoughts towards Twenty20 mainly come from sitting with 10,000 Lancashire supporters in the rain watching Yorkshire get thumped a couple of years back!

With the World Twenty20 just about to get underway, I was however looking forward to the tournament. When this summer's schedule was announced it was just something that filled a calendar month before the Ashes and I had no immediate plans to watch it, but as it grew closer I did find myself more intrigued. I held little hope for an English success from the Men's team, but wanted to study the format in closer detail. I was impressed with the tournament for a few reasons:

The first thing that stuck me was that improvisation was no longer the right of the batsmen. I'd watched Saj Mahmood of Lancashire bowling slow-ball bouncers in the domestic competition and was impressed at the success it had in controlling an over. On the international stage it was also used to good effect. When Harbhajan Singh refused to bowler once Kevin Peterson adopted the Switch-Hit stance, that was another scalp in the rights of bowlers during this tournament! It was spin bowling however, that seemed to see the greatest resurgence during the tournament.

The second most notable outcome of the World T20 however was the role of the established test player. Kallis for South Africa, Dilshan for Sri Lanka in particular but Gayle, Vetorri, Harbhajan, Chanderpaul all showed that a truly class cricketer can prosper in all forms of the game.

My final observation was mainly a personal one. Although the 'ugly' shots were still on show, much of the big hitting was a) from established players and b) clean hitting (for want of a better phrase!). I also found myself enjoying the flying sixes in matches, particularly when the power plays were being exploited by the batsmen. I came to the conclusion that maybe you can forgive the odd slog!

However my overall view on WT20 is slightly more calculated. I noted a few times on Test Match Special and Sky commentaries that our experts often said that in T20 teams who lose early wickets simply don't have the time to rebuild an innings. I don't necessarily agree with that and Sri Lanka can cite a good case in point when looking at the final game. They didn't post the biggest total after losing early wickets but they adopted a strategy and it almost worked for them.

This first observation also seems to lead to the second, in which it was often felt that T20 cricket would replace 50 over cricket in the future because it eliminated the lull in the middle overs of 50 over cricket. I would again argue otherwise! A lot of matches I watched involved the same format. Big start to the innings, then take the singles at 6 per over for the next nine or 10 overs, hoping for a boundary ball every over or so to top up the total before letting lose at the end. It's not too far fetched from the 50 over game plan. I'm not an expert but I'd guess this is probably due to the age-old one-day philosophy of keeping wickets in hand for the end of the innings. I'm not sure T20 has overcome that mindset quite yet.

So to WT20's place at the top table? I'm not convinced it should replace 50 over cricket, although that's not to say I don't see that happening. T20's main advantages lie logistically. As seen in this tournament, more than one match can take place per day and back-to-back matches are realistic. I'd much prefer this approach introduced into the international format, maybe at the expense of lots on 50 over cricket and the Champions Trophy. After a test series why can't three of more countries contest a couple of 50 over games and then a quick T20 tournament over a long weekend or holiday period? You shouldn't have to search the globe with teams to make up the numbers either. In Europe we have Ireland, Scotland and Holland who would benefit from the exposure of playing more established teams. There are plenty of other smaller national around the world who could do the same.

Whatever is decided, the mantra should be Quality over Quantity. It will take resourcefulness and innovation to make that commercially feasible but it's not impossible. In short, more tournament T20 I think is the future, where it can share it's place alongside 50 over cricket and test matches.

A Twitter Experience...

About 6 months ago Twitter.com became huge. Almost overnight. It got an incredible amount of press and everyone wanted part of it. I'm not a natural bandwagon jumper for social networking progressions so it was only after the Mumbai terror attacks and Hudson River plane crash and the role Twitter played in breaking those stories on a world stage I started to take notice. Even then it was more to register my username before someone else did! (that's twitter.com/benchadwick in case you were wondering).

I decided not to post any of my experiences on Twitter until I'd passed through a couple of stages: these were notablly signing up and getting started, understanding how it worked, getting the most (for me) out of it and finally progressing past the novetly factor. Hopefully by waiting I can give a better account and comment on how I found the process.

I began, as I suspect most people do, with the following:

benchadwick: Don't really have anything to say! 2009-01-16 15:49:29 

source: http://myfirsttweet.com

Impressively as I manually search back through some of my early tweets, I seem to have avoided the cliched 'Don't really understand twitter', 'how does this work' and 'this is my first tweet' postings! This can possibly be attributed to the fact that I knew a bit about twitter before signing up or more probably sheer luck!

Lots and lots and lots of people have written on the different stages people go through when using twitter, so I won't! For the record these are good examples: Rohit Bhargava's 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance (pictured), Jason Hiner's 4 Stages for ZDNet and this by Jemima Kiss (of the Guardian fame). 

So I'd signed up to secure my username, done the usual search of people already on there and started to follow them, all with quite an open mind. Using the search function it started to become easy to see how the plane crash and terror attacks could spread. Almost everything tweeted on Twitter is searchable in seconds. There are also ways of following tags (popular subjects such as #hudson or #uksnow to group information together). I also noticed how easy it was to follow other people. In the main you don't even need to ask them first! What slowely became obvious is that Twitter could be a great source of information, depending on the people you follow, but as such following these people on the web can be a bit constrictive.

Not wanting to name drop but I read a tweet by Krishnan Guru-Murthy (twitter.com/krishgm) who said that about 800 was the right amount to follow. I struggle with 60!! In fairness there are third party applications you can use such as tweetdeck to do this, but I've never bothered. Using the web is more restrictive but it also helps you decide who to follow and who not. 100 posts in 10 minutes by one person can be annoying, especially if they are a news outlet. It can be too much to take in, so I found I tend to folllow people who tweet little and often!

So I'd started getting into the swing of things, following a mixture of the rich, famous, news outlets, journalists and friends. I found it easy to follow themes and conversations as they developed as well as taking part myself (note once had an exchange with the mighty @krishgm! I found head to head against Facebook I'd started to prefer it as new information was in far greater supply. However after a while I found that the novetly was wearing off and that unless I had something I thought people might like to hear, I wouldn't say anything. Too often all I could muster was a comment on the salt outside of my office window! 

Maybe it's just the changing of the seasons: holiday mode is kicking in and people spend less time in front of their twitter pages? More likely I believe both myself and twitter are evolving in our uses. Even during my few months with Twitter I've noticed the commercial world stand up and take notice. Some I like, others less so. The main attraction for me is the access to the usually inaccessible. What @simonmayo, @richardpbacon and other public figures think. How journalists such as @jemimakiss and @davidbartlett1 prepare, research, deliver and comment on stories and in the inside track of what is happening on @bbc5live or @channel4news. [incidentally that's how you send people a message, eg. '@benchadwick' in Twitter. I've found people now refer to other people on Twitter with the @ prefix. Presumably because it links to their profile, but I find it amusing!]

There's a whole other side to Twitter that I am yet to embrace, and that I probably won't ever bother to. Ironically this is one of it's main USP's! Because what we say, who we say it to and are basics stats are all easily searchable, Twitter is a goldmine of information to sift, pick out and target for whatever related aspect you are peddling. I found that out the other day. I'd used a service called Nozbe.com and tweeted my experience. The next day a professor from America had sent me a message regarding it! For me what was a little too small a world! For her it opened up a whole new medium for research. 

To conclude my experience with Twitter over the past few months; I've enjoyed it, will probably use it for the foreseeable future but maybe less frequently than in the beginning. I don't have the personality to drive my usage as far as it can go: making friends, contacts, networks online is not something that interests me. I also don't have a professional interest strong enough to follow through. I can't use social networking to enhance my professional career at this point in time. These are the main drivers behind my twitter use falling into line with the likes of Facebook on the social networking front, and the internet sites I visit as a daily ritual! (the beeb, guardian, google reader being the top set)