Although cricket is hugely popular in countries such as India, Australia, England, Pakistan, South Africa and Sri Lanka, it remains somewhat of a foreign concept in many other places around the world. In particular, eastern Asia has rarely been exposed to the sport at any sort of elite level – even though Hong Kong boasts a burgeoning cricketing side which, incredibly, scored one of the biggest upsets of all time only last week when they beat Bangladesh in a Twenty20 (T20) game.
The weekend just gone saw the start of the 2014 T20 World Cup with 10 teams fighting it out to be crowned T20 world champions, and for those of you who aren’t overly familiar with either cricket or the T20 World Cup we thought we’d give you a quick rundown of what’s going on.
T20 is a relatively new format of the game with each match lasting about three hours, as opposed to the much longer Test and One Day formats. For those of you unaware of the difference, Test cricket has been around for close to 150 years with matches lasting for five days. It is called Test cricket because it is considered the ultimate test of a players’ skill, stamina and endurance. If you’re not mentally strong or boast a poor technique, you will inevitably be found out at this level. One Day cricket (ODI) was invented in the 1970s and quickly became popular in Australia before spreading to the rest of the world. Rather than five days, a match lasts just one day with each side bowling 50 overs. The shorter format means batsmen need to score runs faster – although not quite as fast as T20 which sees each side bowl just 20 overs each. As a result, it is an extremely fast and exciting format featuring plenty of big hitting from the batsmen.
Brendon McCullum starred in New Zealand’s win over England on Saturday
First introduced about 10 years ago as a possible means of luring new fans to the game via the shorter, more explosive format, it has proved incredibly popular – particularly in cricket mad India – with most top cricketing nations now playing an annual T20 competition featuring franchises representing different regions of the country.
The most well-known of these is the Indian Premier League (IPL) with the best T20 cricketers from all over the world auctioned off each year to the various franchises. Cricket is big money in India, whose enormous population ensures monstrous television rights deals, and the players have benefited enormously from the IPL with India’s Yuvraj Singh set to earn around US$2.5 million and Dinesh Karthik around US$2.2 million for a few weeks’ work later this year.
In the meantime, however, we’ve got the World Cup. Unlike the more prestigious ODI World Cup which is held once every four years, the T20 World Cup is held every two years – in fact, this is the fifth since 2007 with previous winners including India, Pakistan, England and the West Indies. It boasts the world’s top eight ranked nations – the four above plus Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka and New Zealand – and two nations who qualified from the group stage. This year those two are Bangladesh and the Netherlands.
Indian star Yuvraj Singh
T20 cricket isn’t a great format to bet on because of its unpredictable nature, but for those same reasons it makes for great viewing with plenty of action and some hugely exciting finishes. It can also bring teams back to earth pretty fast – having entered the tournament as one of the favorites and in search of their first T20 World Cup title, Australia suffered a big defeat against Pakistan in their tournament opener overnight and now have plenty of work to do to just to progress to the semi-finals. South Africa also lost their opening game as did the two most recent winners of the tournament in England and the West Indies.
But things are looking good for India who have already won two from two against Pakistan and the West Indies, while New Zealand and Sri Lanka have also started well with first-up wins. If you haven’t ever watched a lot of cricket before and aren’t too sure what it’s all about, we highly recommend this T20 World Cup as the perfect introduction to what can be a truly exciting and fascinating sport.
