The backstop: The T20 treadmill of torment

It is an oddity of cricket that people who play it, or like it, or spend money to support it are obliged also to have powerful feelings about it. Not warm, tolerant feelings, or feelings of very mild disappointment. For the committed follower every piece of news, every alteration to the details of the sport must elicit its own vivid, tribal, deep‑soul response.

Witness, for example, the reaction to the news this month that MCC has decided it is easier to call people who bat “batters”, as opposed to batsmen or batwomen or batboys or whatever. The logical response to this is a kind of human emoji-shrug. Nothing is lost, or even altered much by this move, beyond some useful simplification and making the sport slightly more welcoming to, say, seven-year-old girls. 

Or so you might have thought. In the event the public response has been torn between performative super-approval, and a kind of bedlam-wail of woe, dismay, decay, horror, death. “Was Bradman a batter?” despairing voices have howled into the void. The only feasible reaction to which is an enforced four-hour primal bear hug, combined with whispered, soothing words about manhood, fraternity, validation, and continued relevance, after which thoughts of whether Bradman was a batter or not will hopefully never return, replaced by a sense of cool blue calm. 

Feelings, then, are vital in cricket. And this has been a key objection to T20 and The (admittedly pointless and cynical) Hundred: the lack of deep, complex emotional layers. The mature, dusty bouquet of the red-ball game has been replaced by doe-eyed idiot-joy and spurts of infantile triumphalism. 

This is wrong on various levels. For a start it is the staging, and above all the TV presenters who create the impression of basic imbecility, a problem that can be cured instantly by muting the broadcast volume. And secondly the great revelation of the last 18 months of bubble-era franchise cricket that this is a startlingly cruel, bruising, emotionally complex world.

Followed from league to league, T20 can be unwatchably brutal in the current round-robin, which allows you to track in real time the struggles, the lost form, the visible distress of all your favourite drained and battered cricketers.

^{Worcestershire's Pat Brown}

To give an obvious example, every time Tom Banton pops up on my screen, introduced with gurgling talk of his explosiveness, soundtracked by fan-faring trumpets, I am acutely aware that his actual current run of scores back to August reads 2, 5, 0, 36, 0, 1, 6, 17, 0, 10, 6, 0, or 12 innings at an average of six. 

He looks drained, spooked, but tied to the wheel. And this whole mobile carnival is shot through with minor and major characters who are literally painful to watch, but somehow still keep on dragging their weary bones around the same ritual destruction. 

Chris Morris, a brilliant T20 player, stepped out of five months without playing to bowling an IPL over of grimacing wides and head-scratching hip-high full tosses where it looked at one point as though he might just have to stop. All this dressed in pink silky trousers, and accompanied by the jubilant gurgles of the thrillingly inane IPL MC. 

There are other characters you end up tracking quietly, hoping secretly for some release of pain. Poor old Chris Green of Australia. Nice, diligent Chris Green, whose action was remodelled on the hoof, and who was then wedged back into the circuit, still popping up everywhere, but looking always like a man trying to catch up with himself. The other day I saw him take a wicket with a full toss and punched the air. 

Plus of course we have Pat Brown. Dear Pat Brown, so new, so mystery. But even then a little fraught and angsty, like a delicate child in a sepia Victorian family portrait. Ultimately he was worked over, brutalised and walloped around a series of foreign fields. I have watched Pat Brown walk through this public purgatory, refining his own method on the hoof, that trembling visage bounced across the earth down a sun-bleached line from the distant endless summer. 

Do we even need to mention either of the Currans at this point, the poor, determined, plucky, decelerating Currans? There is a sub-culture of these drained souls, pirates of the Covid-era T20 world tour, with all its tempting riches, its lack of me-time, of sympathy and structure. 

There are no soft edges to this travelling machine, this vision of cricket as pure TV entertainment, of giving it all even while your heart is breaking. And the feelings, well, the feelings are there. They are just wearing lime green trousers now, and advertising cement.

This article was published in the October edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game