The ICC World Twenty 20 rolls on this week. It’s something of a juggernaut, this form of the game. There are national leagues, the lucrative Indian Premier League, a Champion’s League, international matches and a T20 World Cup every two years (as opposed to the conventional four in pretty much every other sport in the world). Strangely, cricket’s governing body, the ICC, got their dates wrong and decided to have another World Cup this year. Less than 12 months after the last one. Go figure.

This abridged cricket format has indeed taken the world by storm drawing new viewers and fans in droves; the type of fans that are reluctant to invest a five days or even a day in a single match. Fair play from the ICC as well. The only way they will break into the supposed panacea that is the American sporting market is to shrink the sport down into a marketable package that can compete with other sports on their networks. A game that lasts 8 hours will never do this; a 3 hour 20/20 match however, is the right idea.

While the majority of India’s cricket-mad fans have taken to T20, there seems to be as much bad press as there is good. There’s an accusation that in attempting to grow the game, cricket’s stakeholders have lost sight of cricket’s values. Basically, some people are being a bit greedy; does the cricket world want all this 20/20 or is it being forced down their throats? I’m not going to get into this argument, suffice to say I think it is being forced down our throats. And if I may: 2 World Cups in 2 years?!?! Rubbish. Real sports like to build some suspense. Cricket, which used to have a mortgage on suspense, now just whores itself out to the highest bidder. To paraphrase my father, I’m disappointed in you, crick.

Anyways.  I said I wouldn’t do that. Twenty20 is here to stay. But with that, there should be some wiggle room. Some time around the 1999 World Cup the organisers introduced a Super 6 format, which has since grown into a Super 8. The premise is, ‘let’s have everyone in pools of 4 who play each other; the top 2 go through and play in a bigger pool with all the second round teams, before settling on semi-finalists.’ Cricket has fallen in love with this format, but it’s not really necessary. If you’re going to hold a World Cup, especially one in which so many games can be squeezed into such a small time frame, why not go back to 1992 rules? Have everyone play each other once and from there, decide who goes through to the semis. Then each team has a comparative record since everyone has played everyone. No need to have 3 separate rounds, the minnows can dine at the top table a little more and the best team can at least say they’ve played everybody. Also, any opportunity recapture the heady days in the picture above must be grabbed. This makes sense to me, a cricket fan.