Eureka! How cricket found its fun

THE man credited with inventing Twenty20 cricket slipped into Melbourne for lunch yesterday and survived without having his wine spiked or the chef poison his chicken. Not that Stuart Robertson feels the least bit like he's created a monster.

He's heard all the groans the cricket conservatives can muster — that the spirit of the game and its true form will starve and die, the fast-food generation has trampled on a century-and-a-half of history, the sky is falling in.

"Every now and then you get people asking if we're holding a tiger by the tail," Robertson told Cricket Victoria's Lindsay Hassett Club luncheon. "But I don't think we are. Cricket can protect its future."

Not so long ago, Twenty20 wasn't Mahendra Dhoni on $1.5 million for a month's work in the Indian Premier League. Or IPL franchises with player salary budgets nearing $7 million. Or West Indian businessman Alan Stanford putting up $1 million a man for the winners of a proposed one-off match in the Caribbean next month. Or Victoria competing for a $6 million prize pool in December's inaugural Twenty20 Champions League in India.

The beginnings were more humble.

Robertson was the England Cricket Board marketing manager in the early 2000s when he was alerted to a 17% decline in attendance at county matches. The local rights holder, Channel Four, put up £250,000 ($A621,000) to find out why. This, says Robertson, "was a eureka moment".

Shortened forms of the shortened form of the game had been around for a while, notably Martin Crowe's Cricket Max, which ran domestically in New Zealand for half a dozen summers from 1996. They had piqued interest, but failed to reach the market Robertson felt was being overlooked.

"The audience at county cricket was largely middle-aged, middle-class white men. We went out and spoke to people who weren't involved in the game — kids, women, families, 16-to-34-year-olds."

Significantly, he says, they spoke to the players. "The last thing we wanted to do was bring in a concept that the players thought was a bit of a joke and weren't going to take seriously."

It didn't happen overnight. In 2002, a year before the Twenty20 explosion, Hampshire played Middlesex twice in a day, behind closed doors, at the Rose Bowl. Sceptical ECB officials looked on. The home team's XI included their physiotherapist. "People weren't taking it too seriously."

The experimental phase included some tricks that finished up on the cutting room floor. At Bristol, Gloucestershire played Lashings, a virtual cricketing rock band, in a game that included "Golden Overs" — when the batting captain could nominate an over between the fifth and 15th in which all runs scored would be doubled.