Don't shift cricket from sport to entertainment

Watching Dennis Lillee run in, was a sight to behold

Cricket has always been a batsman’s game – why? On every occasion that I hear about the changes in cricketing rules by the ICC, I get a common feeling that these changes will surely be beneficial to the batsmen and highly against/not in favour of bowlers. Fielding restrictions, 2 bouncers per over, no ball – free hit: if these are not changes in favour of the batsmen, what are.

Cricket has to be fair in the way it works. If you think that this is an article by someone who loves bowling and is bursting out his anger through this article – you’re bang on! And I’m sure you’ve got akin views too, perhaps different on certain aspects but surely, you’d agree with me on some points.

In addition, it’s not just me that has a strong view on the pointless changes in cricket’s structure to favour batsmen, many cricketing greats share the same viewpoint and in spite of these changes favouring batsmen, many batting greats have strongly opposed ICC’s recent ‘4 fielders maximum outside the 30 yard circle’ ODI rule, with strong offence.

MS Dhoni, the captain of the Indian cricket team, raised his concerns over these changes too. It’s to be tacit that this is a competitive sport – where both batsmen and bowlers must have an equal likelihood of getting fair opportunities to utilize their talent in the most efficient manner.

This is one aspect, another is the rapid changes in cricket pitches – do they support bowlers anymore?

Have you been a keen observer of the game for many years? If so, you ought to have loved the era of 70s and 80s – the very era where bowling was fearsome, dangerous and nasty. With many bowlers touching the height of 6ft and above, batting was a nightmarish task.

Bowlers bending their back and extracting bounce from pitches and hitting batsmen on their head – that’s what you call ‘sight’.

To auxiliary, bowlers had many things going their way during that time. No mandatory field changes, no restriction on bouncers per over and the most important one – green and bowler-friendly cricketing pitches.

The sight of seeing a cricketing pitch blessed with ‘green grasses’, on which bowlers could utilize the conditions to swing the ball both ways – meant the ‘ideal test’ of a batsmen skill and competency to cope up with the ‘real test’, this was a sight which will forever be cherished by a ‘true’ cricket lover.

Such pitches have clearly become a rarity now. Seeing a dry cricket pitch is no way ‘ideal’ for good cricket. I mean, there’s already so much going in the favour of a batsman, the bowlers at least deserve friendly bowling pitches which will in fact raise the competitiveness of the game.

‘Ek over match badlega’ – but not with 20+ runs in an over but with 4 wickets in an over, sounds hopeless? It does to me too but for every ‘real’ cricket fan, it’s just ‘real cricket’ and even if it means being hopeless, that’s our only choice.

We sure want young cricketers to grow up and say, become a Tendulkar, a Lara, a Ponting but we also want young cricketers to grow up and become McGraths, Lillees, Akrams.

The faith of cricket lies with the ICC. It’s time to bring cricket back to ‘sports’ from ‘entertainment’.

To ICC: it’s time to make cricket ‘competitive’ and without more ado, give an end to the argument of ‘cricket is a batsmen game’.