Bat out of hell

The metamorphosis of cricket from sport to business in the last decade lands on a relatively flat pitch.

The good thing about writing the last column of the year is that you need not spend endless driving, eating, and bathing hours groping for a topic — you just look back on the year. And this being the end of the decade gives nine more years to look back on and makes the job 10 times easier. So how did cricket change in the 2000s?

In several ways, of course! It lost the remaining traces of a genteel sport. It became more a business and less a sport. Sharjah is no longer a hotspot. The dour opener who saw off the old ball disappeared; now they want to take the shine off by hitting it hard. No one complains about the Delhi belly or the travails of travelling to India; this is the country where you earn your retirement fund. The corpulent top order batsman (Ranatunga, for example) is gone; well, New Zealand has Jesse Ryder, but he is too good a fielder.

However, more than these, there has been a fundamental change in the game’s character. It has become indisputably the batsman’s game.

Part of the reason for the change is sporting, mainly the decline of fast bowling. From the middle of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, when West Indies ruled, was the era of the fast bowler. The 1990s, while sustaining the pace through Ambrose and Donald, added more dimension through Wasim and Waqar’s skills, and McGrath’s and Pollock’s exciting monotony. In the 2000s, these bowlers faded or disappeared, leaving us with Shoaib’s fickle temperament and Brett Lee’s fragile limbs.

The other — larger — part of the reason is commercial. As television took over the game, the administrators organised more matches in the 2000s: 464 Tests compared with 347 in the 1990s and 1,402 one-day internationals (933 in the 1990s) to go with IPL, World Twenty20 and the Champions League. But more matches alone wouldn’t suffice. So we got more commercials per over and often fewer deliveries. That, too, failed to quench the commercial thirst. They wanted more runs per match, and more runs per over, and that the matches last the distance. So pitches became flatter. Perth lost pace and Sydney its turn. India’s mud cakes got baked to remove cracks and West Indian pitches lost their bite.

The result is that averaging above 50 no longer anoints a batsman as “great”. It used to, mainly because only 28 batsmen managed it in the 50 years from 1950 to 2000. In the 1990s, only three batsmen who scored more than 5,000 runs in the decade averaged above 50. Two of them, Tendulkar and Lara, were geniuses. The third, Steve Waugh, was a genius, too, though of a prosaic, gritty kind. In the 2000s as many as 21 batsmen average more than 50. Among them are Ponting, Dravid and Inzamam, each of whom averaged below 50 in the previous decade.