Test cricket is like Mozart. Twenty20 is the Bee Gees.
I once had a neighbour whose idea of a fun Sunday was to play the Bee Gees’ Greatest Hits on repeat at high volume with the windows open. I’d happily have shot him. The music was tuneful enough (I don’t mean that. I’m just trying to be kind.) but when you’d heard it once you’d heard it all. When you’d heard it twice you never wanted to hear it again. When you’d heard it three times you’d glimpsed hell. When it started for the fourth time you reached for the revolver.
What’s wrong with the Bee Gees? Everything as far as I am concerned, beginning with the teeth. They’re too big, too obvious, too white. They’ve stopped being dentition and become a marketing gimmick. Like Twenty20 cricket.
At the time of writing the Indian Twenty20 competition has just begun. There’s loud music between overs and coloured uniforms and ludicrous team names and fireworks and dancing girls on podiums who are paid to fake enthusiasm and enormous crowds held in cages just as at a Bee Gees concert. Every available scrap of wall or screen is draped in advertising. This isn’t a game of cricket. It’s a transparent exercise in making money. And it works.
It works because it aims low. It aims at the young who are famously gullible and it aims at the simple emotions, the base emotions, the emotions that have been with us since the species evolved and which are of little use in an advanced civilisation except to foster war, racism, myopia, the Bee Gees and Twenty20.
Twenty20 aims to please by emphasising the exciting bits of cricket and omitting the dull bits. But the thinking is fallacious. Exciting bits exist solely because of and in distinction to the dull bits. Twenty20 is like a photograph with only the bright colours printed. Without the dull background, without the contrast, the photo is lost.
Cricket is a game of balance between bat and ball. Twenty20 shifted the balance in favour of the bat. It shortened the boundaries, restricted the fielders, allowed bowlers only four overs while allowing batsmen to bat as long as they wished, and by shortening the match it took the premium off taking wickets. The bowling, frankly, might as well be done by a machine.
The result is that every game is like every other game just as every Bee Gees song is like every other Bee Gees song. One team scores between 120 and 220 and so does the other team. When you’ve seen one game you’ve got the hang of it. When you’ve seen two you’ve seen enough. When you’ve seen three you’ve sniffed the future of commercially driven cretinism. And if you’ve bothered to watch a fourth game, well frankly you are beyond redemption.
The Bee Gees, of course, are squillionaires. Aiming low pays. But will they swim down the gutter of time? Will they endure as Mozart has endured? I doubt it. Mozart may have died a pauper with bad teeth, but they’re still playing his music because in its infinite variety and its infinite subtlety and its infinite human complexity it approaches the rarefied condition of test match cricket.