Hindsight Ain't Twenty20!

So I've just sat through this new fangled Twenty20 style cricket, bought to you by the barrel in the sky, and I don't know what to make of the hype! It's like the powers of the establishment have seen the writing on the wall and adopted an American fast food approach to the old bat and ball game. It takes me back to a song by a long since defunct Gold Coast ban called Thrust, whose defining moment was a song called, "Kentucky", I can hear that chorus, "No more, No more, Kentucky". The thrust here is that the amount of grease from the new "not fried in the name" chook could power a fleet of garbage trucks and possibly clog the arteries of any aspiring Twenty20 kiddie out there. And this is what the commentators predicted, accordingly no old foggies in the box either, just the newspeak converts who can find merit in "Idol Half Time" entertainment, they reckon that a new breed of cricketer is emerging who will only want to play an hour a day and will sell their slogging talents to the highest Indian bidder.

Take this kid who has come from obscurity, by the name of Warner, just the third Australian in 158 years to represent his country before making his first-class debut, who stole the show with his man-of-the-match performance. He was
"plucked from obscurity after several equally electrifying innings for New South Wales in limited overs cricket, Warner has suddenly become the cult hero of Australian cricket."
Could such performances be the new pyjama game standard and will these Y-gen sloggers of the video game age be considered amongst the greats with their feats of athletic roboticism?

I remember another trip to India where a game in the street felt like a Twenty20 encounter, you could turn up in a village, be the star for five minutes (or not) and then drift off into the sunset to count how fortunate you were not to live in relative poverty. How in a country of 900 million impoverished and a middle class about ten times the population of Australia, can it be justifiable to import players for buckets of grease-laden cash, to entertain the squalid masses, while leaving people without much hope of ever getting entry to the ground, let alone winning a thousand smackers from latching onto a catch from some hacker who hit a sixer (sorry they now refer to them as maximums) into the crowd?
Could cricket really be the bringer of so much hope? I don't know, perhaps caste reform is the big mover, but hindsight might just be the big shaker!

Anyway, what would Gandhi think, some say he was mad about cricket, from his London days you know, even though he devoted a large part of his life to the independence movement, Swaraj or "Home Rule" and cricket served as a reminder of how British colonialism had infected Indian society.
One of his more famous quotes was, "you have to be the change that you wish to see in the world", but whether that could extend to Twenty20 is certainly debatable.

Standby, there's more first-classless cricket to come this year, and with that amount of slogging don't be suprised if the Yanks send a squad to the world cup.