The importance of Sports in life is immense, much beyond recreation, fun and exercise. Sports teaches an individual on how to cope up with pressure-like situations, it unites people, it creates bonds amongst people irrespective of their colour, caste, religion and most importantly it resembles life.
Though each and every sport has a story of its own and in some way or the other resembles life, the story of Cricket is unique and one of its kind. One thing that is so unique with the game of Cricket is the way it has evolved. It has evolved to survive, it has evolved to become much more intense and entertaining and more importantly, it has evolved to keep up the pace of the life.
Remember that time between 1877-1939 when only Test matches were played and those matches used to be timeless. Matches were played for days after days until we got the result and that was the way of life then, everyone had ample of time.
But just as animals and human beings evolved, so did Cricket and generally, evolutions taking place are accidental, aren’t they? And the accident which occurred back then was that the English team which was playing against South Africa in South Africa in 1939, after ten days of play, had to leave the Test match uncompleted. The reason being they had to catch the ship to take them back home as the next ship wasn’t scheduled for quite a while.
That was it, it was an end of an era, the concept of timeless Test Match was put to an end and Test Cricket became a 5-day affair. It was Cricket’s first evolution. If it took about 60 years for this change to happen, the next evolution in Cricket came about 30 years later in Australian Summer of 1970-71, when cricketing world witnessed the birth of one-day Cricket.
The advent of One-day Cricket
This change, too, was accidental, but it revolutionized the way the game was played. The first four days of new Year Test of 1971 between Australia and England were washed out due to bad weather and to avoid financial losses and just to appease the furious spectators, both the boards decided to play a one-day match of 40 eight-ball overs and guess what, the fans were thoroughly entertained and large masses who turned up went home happily.
From timeless Test to One-day, the game of Cricket had already evolved in itself a lot, trying to keep itself up to date with the pace of life. The birth of One-day Cricket increased the popularity of the game manifold and as a result, game’s first global event, Prudential World cup was played in England in 1975.
There was a new format, the game’s popularity had risen like never before, but Cricket was missing something, neither it had the money nor it had any glamour. But that was soon to change and Kerry Packer from Australia launched World Series Cricket in 1977 which altogether changed the face of the game.
Kerry Packer and World Series Cricket gave a great impetus to the players financially, Cricket was played with coloured clothing and the matches, for the first time ever in cricket, were played under lights. Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket no doubt was a rebel and was disliked by boards but it certainly set the tone for how the game was going to be played in the future.
The money that Kerry Packer brought into the game was a sigh of relief for budding cricketers back then, as now, they could consider Cricket as a Career option, a job that could satisfy their financial needs. As the time passed by, One-day Cricket started to grow and went through many changes as well.
One-day Cricket initially was a 60-over per side affair that was played under broad daylight in white clothing but as we see now, it is a 50-over per side contest played under lights in coloured clothing. But, as the name suggests, it is still a one-day match that gallops eight hours, about the same amount of time a person works for in any corporate office.
The birth of T20 Cricket
By the time 21st Century begun, life of people had gathered a fair amount of pace and even a one-day match started to look long that chewed up a lot of time and Cricket needed something that was fast, something that took less time and something more dramatic if it had to survive in a World that had become far glamorous than it was ever before.
And somehow Cricket always had a solution to any new problem it faced and that led to the birth of T20 Cricket in England in 2003. T20 Cricket has everything that the modern world desires, it is entertaining, it is glamorous, it is fast and breath-taking that resembles people’s life in the 21st century.
It is just like watching a three and a half-hour movie and it is the Cricket’s only format that could compete with other fast-paced sports if any such comparison ever has to be made. If T20 cricket was itself a revolution, the way it was promoted was much more revolutionary.
18 April 2008, the first day of Indian Premier League, the franchise-based Cricket which was being played for the first time ever was launched in the grandest possible way to a nation that eats, sleeps and bleeds cricket. After that, there was no stopping for T20 cricket as it spread not only in main cricket-playing nations, but also to associate nations and non-cricket playing nations at a much faster rate than anyone could predict.
The act of evolving itself is Cricket’s biggest strength and it is continuing to do so as we just saw a first day-night Test Match being played between Australia and New Zealand in November 2015. The fact that stands out in Cricket and its journey through evolutions is the way it has always found a way to resemble life.
Cricket has always undergone changes to suit the demands of that particular time and to match the pace of life and in spite of all that, Cricket’s all the three formats: Tests, ODIs and T20s still continue to co-exist in peace and harmony without threatening each other.
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