The recently concluded edition of the Bangladesh Premier League -- the country’s take on the regional T20 tournaments first popularized in India through the IPL had a fitting finale. Tamim Iqbal scored a mammoth 141 off 60-something deliveries, and brought Comilla their second success in the tournament, overcoming perennial finalists and favourites Dhaka led by the country’s best cricketer Shakib Al Hasan.
The results, however, are not what intrigued me about the tournament. Rather, it was the chatter in certain circles or lack thereof in others, that caught my attention.
T20 cricket in itself is a polarizing format of the gentleman’s game. Purists shun it for essentially being a slog-fest, taking the modern trend since the turn of the new century of skewing the game in the batsman’s favour beyond what is often acceptable in the eyes of many long-term cricket watchers.
Gone is the tactical and patient mastery and knowledge of the game required in test cricket. ODI cricket too, certain quarters would claim, requires a more nuanced and measured approach to the game, a far cry from the gung-ho, swinging for the fences approach that T20 seems to promote, and indeed, encourage.
Such thinking, however, also leads to these “purists” drawing expansive conclusions, which, though perhaps true amongst the company they keep or engage with, could not be further from the truth when looked into from a broader lens.
The conclusion, that “nobody watches the BPL” can essentially be translated to “nobody who really cares about cricket watches the BPL because the tournament is essentially a showcase of ‘bad cricket’.”
I must admit that I have certainly been part of the crowd which would unabashedly relegate a tournament such as the BPL as “bad cricket” and claim that it’s essentially not worth the effort and time to pay attention to it. However, what cannot be disputed is that the BPL (and other such tournaments), along with T20 cricket in general, whether we the so-called “purists” like it or not, has firmly established its place within the world of cricket.
And the people of Bangladesh were most certainly watching the BPL final, regardless of what the purists feel. There was visible excitement on the streets -- security guards were tuned in to the radio for updates, people were walking and simultaneously asking for updates, electronics showrooms had huge crowds gather outside to watch the game playing on their TVs, restaurants had offers alluding to it, and even the traffic seemed more lax in Dhaka as a result of people glued to their screens at home.
Because most people do not watch sports with an eye for the technical, the nuanced, the finessed. At its essence, most people watch sports during their leisure time, passively, with their brain essentially resting. They are not dissecting it into statistics, analytics, or judging it for its perceived quality, of what it contributes to society, or whether it’s being played in “the right way.”
They just want some entertainment.
This is precisely why it’s T20 tournaments which draw in the crowds, not test cricket. With crowds come sponsors, and one feeds the other in this agenda-driven world we live in and permits the formats, the tournaments from getting bigger.
The 21st century, with the proliferation of social media, has seen human beings further starved of their ability to pay attention for longer periods of time. This is the generation of instant gratification, of dopamine junkies.
As such, T20 cricket -- and indeed newer formats such as 10-over and even six over cricket -- works perfectly in a world which continues to jump from one event to the other much like we jump from one tab to the other on our browsers, or from one chat head to the other as we converse with our “connections.”
This is not to say that there is no place today for test cricket. In fact, it’s more important than ever for organizers and cricket boards across the world to preserve the heritage of the original format of the game, and using the revenue generated by the shorter formats to support test cricket.
There are many ways to view the shorter, more “exciting” forms of cricket. Dismissing it as the villain which has destroyed cricket, rather than see it as an opportunity to build a stronger foundation by using its positives to the cricketing world’s advantage, is retrograde thinking.
AHM Mustafizur Rahman is an Editorial Assistant at the Dhaka Tribune.
