In the barbershop, where my pardner Rudd painstakingly earns his fee by taking more than half-an-hour to cut my hair–most of his craft clearly consists of pure showmanship–with the TV showing the highlights of the Indian Premier League (of cricket) it took a couple of minutes for it to sink in just what we were watching. Then I shook my head in disbelief–a move that would surely have resulted in a zog, if I possessed enough hair to achieve a bad haircut–and asked, "You realise what we watching? Highlights of 20/20 cricket? How they manage that? T20 cricket is all firetrucking highlights!
Rudd laughed, shoulders shaking (again, avoiding what would have been serious haircut damage if he'd had Kees Diffenthaller or Don King in his chair). "You right," he replied. "Even a no-ball results in a free hit and more sensationalism!" "If the most exciting T20 finish now is the super-over," I asked, "how long will it be before we're playing actual OOIs–One Over Internationals?"
Rudd chuckled but I wasn't really joking: following the trajectory from Test through 50-Over to T/20 international cricket, it's a question of when, not if, we reach one-ball cricket. I can almost hear CNC3 TV sportscaster Roger Sant reporting: "Australia lost the Frank Worrell series against West Indies today when the West Indies posted a first innings score of one and the Aussies, in reply, could only muster a total of nought.
After the follow-on was enforced, the Aussies were again bowled out for duck, thereby losing by an innings and one run". Indeed, how long can it be before the Ashes are decided on a coin toss? As long as the television rights can be sold for the same or more money, what's happening on the screen almost doesn't matter; as the winter Olympics and Stephen Colbert taking over from David Letterman prove.
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