Are ODIs irrelevant or a unifying force?

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All this talk of a possible divorce between Test and T20 cricket greatly underestimates cricket’s ability to plough on with much the same structure even though no-one’s really happy.

Radical change is not really cricket’s thing. The sport is more of a gelatinous goop that gives to accommodate whatever happens to push against it.

Over at Wisden, we’re making the unfashionable case that 50-over cricket has reverted to being what it was originally supposed to be: the showcase for all of cricket’s top players. You can read the full story here.

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10 comments

  1. I have seen some people looking at this as the split being inevitable and there being a Rugby League/Union situation in the making for cricket.

    ODI is quite important if you like Test cricket I think, because I see it being more PDC/BDO in darts if ODI dies off and T20 and Test become separate codes. Within 10 years there would be no money at all in Test cricket, and the T20 code would just hoover up anyone that showed the slightest bit of talent. Sure you would get the odd Alastair Cook, but mostly it would end up being youngsters looking to earn a T20 deal or has beens eeking out a couple more years of earning.

    For example, I would be interested to know what the annual earnings of a bang average T20 player, let’s say Moises Henriques, stacks up against Nathan Lyon. That would only get worse if the game split in two.

    1. According to a pair of random websites that a google search threw up, Moises Henriques has a net worth that’s 10 times as much as Nathan Lyon. (30m vs 3m)

      That is likely to be very inaccurate though.

  2. Speaking of irrelevance, the Pakistan Super League has a team called the Multan Sultans.

    I posit that from now on, all T20 franchises should strive to rhyme. We’ve been deprived of the Delhi Machiavellis and the Guyana Bandanas for too long.

  3. I find that the growth of T20 has increased my enjoyment of ODIs. In the past, with the irritating certainty of youth, I used to treat ODIs with a degree of condescension as being the inferior form of the game, trivial and lacking in narrative. Now with T20 as a repository for that mild contempt, ODIs have a new respectability. Perhaps they lack the grandeur of a great novel, but have enough meat to serve as a volume of related short stories- a sort of Plain Tales from the Hills (choose your own favourite player as Mrs. Hauksbee). Like Kipling, we aren’t supposed to like ODIs anymore, but both have become guilty pleasures of mine.

    1. Quite simply one if the best appeals that I’ve read and with a splendid Victorian literary bent.

    2. Wait til they launch the One1. Then twenty over stuff will resemble the finely layered texture of a classic Test match.

      Until they launch the BallBall.

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