by Ikaros Marks

Created on: June 14, 2009

T20 Cricket is the newest form of "The Gentleman's Game" to have an impact on the sport world. Previously, many people had thought of cricket as a long, boring, five-day event that precluded a lot of mind-numbing blocking and no real action. This changed with the first ever Cricket World Cup in 1975.

A series of five-day matches was impractical to base a world cup on, simply because it was very time consuming and if teams were to play a round-robin type of tournament, they would be there for very close to a year. The ICC adopted a tradition of English Club Teams and developed a new set of rules for "Limited Over Internationals" or "One-Day Internationals" (ODI's as they are now called) to fill the clamouring by the stands for a shorter version of the game.

The drawback to the game of cricket has always been the amount of time that one has to dedicate to playing the game. In 2003, declining attendances at English County Club games forced the ECB to delineate a new set of rules for a shorter, faster-paced version of the game, hailed as "20-20 cricket". The idea had been previously discussed in 1998, but it wasn't until the attendances plummeted to their lowest point in decades that the cricket board decided it had to act. International Twenty-20 (T20) games began being played in 2005 and presently the Indian Premier League (IPL) is the largest and most lucrative of the T20 Domestic Leagues.

The new form of the game pits two teams of eleven against each other in a twenty-over showdown, and is usually completed in a space of two-and-a-half to three hours. Compared to the ODI's of the past and present which take as much as eight hours to complete, this is a huge improvement.

Since the major argument of the Olympic board against having cricket installed as an Olympic sport is that of time, this much-shortened form of the game should be given consideration as a possible inclusion in the Olympic games. On average, one game of T20 fills the space of time the same as two games of football (soccer). This should be a good enough time-space to dedicate to cricket as an Olympic sport.

The International Olympic Committee has officially recognised cricket as a sport, and has been played previously in the year 1900, where two teams (Britain and France) participated. Given the much advanced stage of world cricket now and with the advent of the T20 World Cup in England in 2009, the sport of cricket is well on its way to becoming an Olympic sport. However, for cricket to be a competitive sport featured on the Olympic roster, it will need full recognition and status, placing the earliest possible time for it to be seen in the 2020 Olympics.

Learn more about this author, Ikaros Marks.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.