This piece was originally published in the cricketer.
Angelo Mathews takes a catch on the Trent Bridge boundary. He throws the ball up in the air as the momentum takes him over the rope. But the ball drifts back over the boundary. Mathews who is now on the wrong side of the rope, jumps up in the air and volleyball slaps the ball as hard as he can. He just manages to clear the rope and save the boundary. Then he runs back onto the field and fires a throw back in.
That might seem normal now. In 2009, that was superman.
But it wasn't just the fielding that was extraordinary. Sri Lanka had Ajantha Mendis bowling the delivery. A mystery bowler who could spin the ball both ways with off-spin, wrong'uns, and a new delivery called a carrom ball. The batter was Ramnaresh Sarwan, who played a dirty sloggy pull shot. Sarwan was a distinguished nuggety Test batter, but here he sees a short ball and tries to flat back a six down the ground.
Writing about this ball now, nothing is that out of the normal. Of course a Test player who is on the slow side would flat bat a spinner down the ground. It makes sense that a bowler now would combine finger and offspin based on matchups. And fielding on the boundary is now very much on both sides of the rope.
Cricket has been changed by the short formats. But even within that, T20 is constantly evolving itself.
The first international T20 match was between Australia and New Zealand, and some players wore wigs. That makes it sound like the beginning of T20 was a bit more of a circus than it was.
Surrey won the inaugural T20 competition in the world, and many of their players have stated that they did not take it seriously when it started. They started too as they won matches. These are professional competitive players.
But if you take a deeper look at the first few seasons, you can it was already changing how we played the game. Much of this is covered in the book, Cricket 2.0. Derbyshire believed in rotating the bowlers every over. So bowler one, then two, then three, followed by four, and then five. John Inverarity thought you would win the game by scoring more twos. Sussex and James Kirtley were inspired by Moneyball (the book, well before the movie), and he tried to get in the way of batters with his follow-through. And the batters attacked even more than in the years that followed.
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