I developed an interest in cricket through the one day form and then transitioned to appreciating Test cricket. Maybe, the newcomers would like to move from T20 to ODIs and then finally learn to appreciate Test cricket.

However there is something that needs to be kept in mind. With an explosion in T20, ODIs will actually be cut down on as teams anyway play just 12 tests a year according to ICC rules. However this could present a dilemma as ODI’s will remain the main cash cow as far as TV companies and cricket boards are concerned, as high viewership (and 100 adbreaks for 100 overs in an ODI) would mean more money. So it would be interesting to see how things get worked out.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if T20 squeezed ODI’s entirely over the long term leaving Test cricket (for the real guys) and T20 for the masses. Although, with corporatisation of cricket now, it looks like the IPL (and the increasingly powerful BCCI) would determine the future of cricket.

Will it kill test cricket? It could be argued that the fifty over game has already killed test cricket outside England and Australia, if twenty20 replaces the tedious fifty over game then it’s OK with me.

Roswitha, there were a couple of interesting articles on the IPL in the Times today. This one by Christopher Martin-Jenkins suggests the IPL and Twenty20 seriously threatens Test cricket. The Doosra blog, though, is less pessimistic: “There’s no way an IPL or any Twenty20 contest will inspire the sort of navel-gazing or chest-thumping that accompanies defeat and victory against fierce foes in the international arena.”

Which brings us to Dave’s point. Twenty20 is a real quandary for cricket fans. On the one hand, it’s brought a renewed interest and younger audiences out to cricket, fans who want a night’s entertainment (Test cricket and four day domestic cricket is traditionally played from morning until 5 or 6pm) and it’s obviously much more suited for television. Indeed, much more like baseball.

For me, I actually prefer to Twenty20 to the previous “one-day” abbreviated forms of the game, which also lasted most the day but didn’t stretch beyond that as Test cricket does. At least this form bottles things up more briefly and doesn’t pretend to be something else.

But it has nothing of the build-up, tension and drama that a five day Test match as part of a series that lasts all summer can develop. Many series have captured the nation’s attention all summer. But withTwenty20, along with other forms of one day cricket, clogging up media attention and the calendar, the beautiful subtlety of cricket’s old-fashioned form is in danger of being lost.

I think it’s true that a large portion of cricket fans will always appreciate Test match cricket more than these brief versions, and not just in England and Australia. The problem is where the money gets so big in Twenty20 that more of these IPL-like tournaments dominate the calendar and squeeze out Test match cricket entirely.

Cricketers aren’t used to being paid in millions. The international cricket governing body doesn’t have the power Fifa does over football to kill proposals like this — players have always been more willing to give up international sanctioned cricket in the chase for money in breakaway leagues, unlike in football (so far!): see the rebel tours of South Africa during Apartheid, for example, or a previous and somewhat similar television venture launched by Kerry Packer three decades ago. As Roswitha mentions, a rival breakaway league in some ways forced the hands of the cricket authorities to approve the IPL.

It’s worth noting that several teams in the I-League, apart from new kids like Viva Kerala, are venerable institutions, and have strong local supporter bases in traditionally footie-crazy areas of the country, such as Dempo and Salgaocar in Goa, and of course, Mohun Bagan and East Bengal in Calcutta. They’ve been around since before the I-League and are likely to be around after.

Phew. Sorry for the tl;dr comments. Again, thanks for a super post.

With soccer, though, there’s no place to fit the commercials, except at halftime. That makes TV people freak out.

Here’s a legitimate question — will Twenty20 Cricket make the game more like baseball in terms of viewing? And is that a good thing?

The IPL and the ICL (rival breakaway Twenty20 league floated by an angry cable television magnate - I don’t know if you’ve seen this ) are very much an attempt to make Indian cricket as much like English football as possible - comparisons between the Indian cricket team and England’s national football team have been around for some time already (all that money, all those sporting slip-ups). It’ll be interesting to see how this changes the face of cricket’s top flight, which, of course, are its fifteen or so Test-playing nations. Will we come to a stage where the cricket-watching world would rather watch Delhi v/s Calcutta in a Twenty20 instead of a Pakistan-Australia Test? There is so much money sloshing about in the IPL right now and so many quality players being lured out that the entire sporting calendar, the way we view the game itself, might change.

It doesn’t make me happy personally, because I’ve begun to detest Twenty/20 cricket, faced with the prospect of so much of it, but on the most objective level it’s going to be interesting to see how radical the changes are. The balance always seems to tip in favour of the money, but it’s impossible to forget that the critical and cultural hegemony in cricket is still very much in the hands of old-timers England and Australia.

will football’s global hegemony eventually smash cricket’s hold on the Indian subcontinent?

Wow, it appears that there’s no way out of this. Maybe we can all develop an all-consuming passion for figure-skating and leave them both to kill each other off.

I don’t believe that domestic Indian football is doomed however, as the market is simply too huge, but the developmental and institutional hurdles are high, as the comments in the Guardian blog speak to. The I-League did not even play its matches on weekends for this just-ended season. http://www.goal.com/en-us/Articolo.aspx?ContenutoId=598525