Cricket 2.0

by Tim Wigmore

  While playing in Canada, Khan was signed by the cricket agency Insignia, who specialise in representing T20 players. Khan’s agent, Eddie Tolchard, ‘made me a promise that if we keep working hard I don’t have to go back to my regular nine-to-five job again,’ Khan said. ‘He promised me that you won’t have to sell another phone again.’ And so in 2018, after eight years at Cricket Wireless, Khan left the firm to become a professional cricketer.

  He believes that his circuitous journey to becoming a full-time cricketer, just before turning 28, would have been impossible before T20. ‘It would have been really hard if there were no leagues or T20,’ he said. ‘T20 has given me an opportunity to showcase my skills in front of a wider audience. Associate players running shoulder to shoulder with known international stalwarts has given us an opportunity to show that we can stand with the best in the world.’

  Like Mujeeb Zadran, Zakir Khan and Sandeep Lamichhane before him, Ali Khan was in Rashid’s debt. Where once teams looked down on players from emerging nations, Srikkanth said, ‘Rashid Khan changed that mindset for good.’ Rashid and T20 have begun to make cricket a sport for those from Kabul, Kathmandu and perhaps even Kansas City, not just Kent and Kolkata.

  As players, agents and teams alike search for any competitive advantage they can find, so they will increasingly scour the globe in search of talents from outside cricket’s traditional heartlands. Thanks to T20, cricket is at the onset of a great revolution: of finally becoming a game open to all the talents, regardless of the nationality on their passport.

  FOURTEEN

  THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL T20 DYNASTY

  ‘Gents, let’s go and take what’s ours’

  Marlon Samuels, before the 2016 T20 World Cup

  On weekends and weekday evenings in Trinidad and Tobago, games of windball cricket are dotted throughout the country. Matches are played to a backdrop of live music, free-flowing beer and healthy crowds, often into the hundreds for league matches, rising to four figures for finals. Some forms of windball cricket are played year-round in Trinidad.

  These matches share much with T20 cricket, yet the game itself is organised differently. In Norman’s Windball League, one of the most popular leagues, each innings only lasts 12 overs, so the matches take about an hour and a half. Matches are played, usually on concrete, with a windball – a tennis ball, sometimes covered with extra tape. There is no lbw rule. And bowlers can choose whether to bowl normally – or ‘pelt’, which means they can throw the ball, contravening the normal 15-degree limit for bowlers to straighten their arms in professional cricket.

  Windball cricket is played throughout the Caribbean; the annual West Indies Windball Cricket Championships, played over ten overs a side, ran from 1991 until the mid 2000s. But the beating heart of windball is found in Trinidad, which has underpinned the West Indies’ T20 glories, both in lifting two World Cups and in dominating leagues around the world.

  ‘Windball cricket is a backyard sport in Trinidad,’ explained Azad Ali, one of the founders of a league called the QPCC Windball Tournament, which plays matches at the famous Queen’s Park Oval in the capital Port of Spain. ‘Your parents would put a bat and a ball in a car trunk and take you to the beach or your aunt or uncle. When you go into the back of the yard everybody plays windball cricket. After school they go to the savannah, or they go to their neighbour’s house and play it in the yard.’

  The format can be adapted to any circumstance: ‘We designed it to play on the streets of Trinidad.’

  Trinidad and Tobago is T20’s talent gold mine; nowhere on earth has produced so much T20 royalty per head of population. Windball cricket has turned into a nursery for international cricket’s first T20 dynasty.

  ***

  Norman Mungroo is the founder of Norman’s Windball League, an 11-a-side competition which has grown from 12 teams in 2004 to 54 in 2019. There is a picture that Mungroo cherishes, in which he is standing in the middle of five men. To his left are Kieron Pollard and Rayad Emrit; to his right are Sunil Narine and Lendl Simmons. All four played T20 for the West Indies; three – Pollard, Narine and Simmons – won the T20 World Cup.

  In between their sojourns in lucrative T20 leagues, Trinidad and Tobago’s T20 stars have still made time to play windball. Narine, Pollard and Dwayne Bravo all continued to play after winning the World Cup; Nicholas Pooran, considered one of the coming West Indies stars, played windball cricket in 2019, a week before leaving for that season’s IPL. These players continued playing windball because it is fun, and the prize money – $14,000 shared between the team winning the premier division, and sums for those lower down – is a nice side-earner. They also play it because, in the skills it demands, windball is like a more intensive version of T20.

  ‘People come out to see superstars. It’s right in the backyard here so it’s really, really awesome to see the guys playing,’ said Mungroo. ‘All the big guns in the Trinidad team who played with the West Indies and in all the different franchises over the world come to play. It keeps them fit and they’re learning a lot from windball to T20 cricket. It’s even faster than T20 . . . That’s why so many of the better T20 players are from Trinidad.’

  As captain of Trinidad and Tobago from 2001 to 2011, across all three formats of the sport, Daren Ganga was sometimes concerned about the amount of windball cricket that players including Simmons, Narine, Pollard and the Bravo brothers, Darren and Dwayne, would play, even during the professional seasons. ‘I as captain would hear that these guys were playing softball cricket in the night and it came to the point where I had to talk to them seriously about the wear and tear on their body and how it can negatively impact their hard-ball game.’

  Yet, for T20 windball was advantageous: ‘There were no rules, you could reverse sweep, you could swing as hard as possible.’

  Windball taught batsmen not to value their wicket too greatly. For players nursed on longer versions of the sport, T20 posed a fundamental challenge: how to learn to fear for their wicket less. Yet players reared on windball did not need to attempt to unlearn these new ways, as distilled by Narine’s success as a T20 opener attacking with alacrity from his first ball. Ganga recalled often ‘driving through the area where Sunil is from and you see him playing on a concrete strip with all the community members’.

  As a batsman, Narine became among the most feared in all windball cricket. ‘He’s a devastating batsman when he bats in windball. He will hit you for five sixes, six sixes – easy,’ Ali said. ‘He’s just a natural to the game. Most of his technique came from windball – especially outside the off stump.’

  Windball developed both batsmen’s attitude and skills to thrive in T20. The balls move considerably in the air, forcing batsmen to adjust to late movement and get in position fast, Mungroo explained.

  ‘The windball will be doing all kinds of things so if they can hit that windball, hard ball comes like nothing for them. So it’s a good training. This windball moves a lot, it comes through fast, so these guys need foot movement, eyesight.

  ‘Some of the coaches might say this windball might spoil you or whatever. I would say no – this windball cricket give them good eyesight, give them a lot of foot movements.’

  The lack of the lbw law in windball, Mungroo said, encouraged players to use their feet innovatively and move around their stumps, especially to open up the leg side, as they then might in T20. ‘This is why the guys have such a free way of batting, because there’s no lbw, so they move fast across the wicket to pick up the line and length.

  ‘If you notice how Pooran and Sunil club this ball, Pollard . . . These fellas when you see them batting with the windball it’s the same way as with the hard ball.’

  More condensed versions of windball elevated the need for big hitting even further. Ali created an eight-over, eight-a-side league called the QPCC Windball Tournament. Two-a-side windball cricket would also be played in a cage, with batsmen awarded runs depending on where they hit the ball. The only way to get a six was to hit the b
all straight over the bowler’s head – something that Narine and Pollard became particularly adept at in windball and T20 alike, Ali said.

  ‘That’s why Pollard is so effective with his sixes because in windball cricket, the easiest boundary, that gives you the most amount of runs, is straight back over the bowler’s head. In cage cricket if you hit to the sides you have to run your runs. So windball cricket encourages you to play correct, straight back over the bowler’s head.’

  Ganga, who captained Pollard for Trinidad and Tobago at the start of his career, believed that this aptitude of hitting the ball straight set Pollard apart. ‘The big difference with Kieron Pollard as against many of the big hitters in world cricket is that, although now he seems to choose the leg-side option as his most favoured option, when he was a teenager his power option was always down the ground. He was always looking to hit the ball very straight and that stood out.’

  For bowlers, windball cricket forced them to adapt to survive. In windball, ‘players who would never make it professionally were developing adaptations to their deliveries like a knuckleball where you pressed on the soft ball and it dipped and gripped off the surface,’ Ganga recalled. ‘All these sorts of subtle variations allowed our hard-ball players to be exposed and they started implementing that in their hard-ball game.

  ‘The prime example of that is Sunil Narine . . . Playing softball cricket I think his variations, his uniqueness in terms of his grip – all those things would have also contributed positively to his development.’

  Batsmen, in turn, became more adroit at recognising and adapting to variations. And the nature of windball meant that fielders became well versed in spectacular catches on the boundary rope, which Pollard and others from Trinidad became renowned for.

  Playing against some of the world’s best T20 players in windball – as the young Pooran did against Narine, for instance – then developed the next generation at an accelerated rate. ‘So when we know Sunil Narine and Kieron Pollard are playing in a match, plenty of people will go there to see them,’ Ali said. ‘A lot of people like to play against them, a lot of people like to challenge them.’

  ***

  After Allen Stanford’s imprisonment for 110 years for presiding over an extraordinary Ponzi scheme, the Coolidge ground he built in Antigua for his tournaments – unkempt, overgrown and disused – looked scarcely more appealing than Stanford’s Florida prison cell. It seemed like a sad encapsulation of the West Indies’ whole tawdry entanglement with Stanford. Yet the competition’s legacy was altogether more complicated.

  When Stanford created and funded the Stanford 20/20 tournament in 2006, it was acclaimed as a tool to reinvigorate Caribbean cricket. ‘We thought cricket was fading away. People’s focus was starting to shift. That brought everything back,’ reflected Ramnaresh Sarwan, who enjoyed a distinguished West Indies career and captained Guyana to the first title. Sarwan also played in the game between Stanford Superstars and England.

  With the Stanford 20/20, Sarwan noticed an immediate shift. Players began doing more weights, to improve their six-hitting ability, at the expense of endurance training. ‘That’s why they’ve become even stronger,’ he reflected. ‘The majority of the guys are in the weights room; there’s not much running these days. For Test cricket it was more endurance work we had to do, just very light weights. Now guys are doing much heavier weights and I think that’s one of the reasons guys are hitting the ball so far.’

  Heightened professionalism – Sarwan considered the Stanford tournament more professional than the West Indies team at the time – abetted this shift. ‘It was the first time we were really introduced to the types of food that would allow you to perform at a certain level. It was a whole new beginning for us in terms of understanding nutrition.’

  The Stanford 20/20 ‘was a competition and a format of the game that brought a totally different perspective on our cricket,’ said Ganga, who captained Trinidad and Tobago in the first final. ‘Our cricket back then – mid to late 2000s – was going through a tumultuous time. There were issues with the board at national level, that’s well documented. The first-class cricket standards needed to improve from the quality of the venues, the arrangement and remuneration that went with first-class cricket.’

  The financial incentives were totally out of kilter with the norm in Caribbean domestic cricket. Each winning team in a match shared $30,000; the man of the match received $25,000. The ‘play of the day’ – the best single moment in a game, normally a six, brilliant ball to get a wicket or spectacular catch – received $10,000 for essentially one ball’s work. ‘That was mind-boggling,’ Ganga said. ‘Nowhere could a first-class player get the opportunity to earn money to that sort of level. So it brought a certain seriousness, it brought an intensity.

  ‘The equipment, the clothing – everything contributed positively to the players and them wanting to express themselves and be part of the national team and excel in this competition. So the standard of playing rose as well.’

  The tournament ‘really allowed a lot of West Indians and Trinidadians an opportunity to learn the game and develop approaches way before any of the other players in world cricket,’ Ganga recalled.

  ‘I think the opportunity to play it from the onset would have contributed positively to our players being more competent than all the other players around the globe because we had those experiences a lot earlier than other international players.’ This ‘led to our players developing variations in their bowling, being innovative in their batting and showing more power than anything else’.

  Greater financial rewards also kept players in the game. Samuel Badree, who would rise to become the number one T20 bowler in the world, was 25 at the time of the first Stanford tournament; struggling to break into domestic cricket in longer formats, he might have given the game up for good without the fillip of the tournament.

  For penurious boards, T20 offered the only plausible route to receiving substantial corporate sponsorship. ‘Territorial boards poured resources into T20,’ said Ganga; it was pragmatic to prioritise the format.

  The same logic extended to the grassroots game. ‘T20 is simply more affordable, and affordable is often the deciding factor in many things in the Caribbean,’ explained Julian Cresser, an academic from the Caribbean specialising in West Indies cricket. ‘Schools, clubs, communities, even the West Indies cricket board, simply can no longer afford the money, or time, to play longer cricket.’ Many regional youth tournaments are now played just in the limited overs formats. ‘The result is that from very early, players who have the skills to succeed in the shorter formats are promoted to the front and other players fall by the wayside.’

  T20 was a natural fit for the West Indies’ traditional strengths. If the notion of calypso cricket was easily exaggerated – West Indies also produced fine but more cautious Test match batsmen, like Larry Gomes and Shivnarine Chanderpaul – it contained some truth.

  ‘Young boys and girls develop their athleticism from an early age,’ said Cresser. ‘T20 cricket draws on this athleticism – many of the best sportspersons are multi-sport athletes in their youth.’

  Sarwan was ‘not surprised’ by the West Indies’ subsequent success in T20. ‘The build and striking of the ball – it was like it was tailor-made for us, the majority of our players. I mean Dwayne Bravo, Pollard, Russell, Gayle who dominated T20 cricket. If you take a look at those guys, they’re built like machines to play T20.’

  ‘It is the style of cricket that West Indians play – it’s very instinctive, it’s very natural, it’s got a lot of flair,’ Ganga said. ‘A cavalier style sort of approach to the game and different formats. The West Indian style fits perfectly with the requirements for T20 cricket because it requires you to be fearless as a cricketer and that’s why you see a lot of West Indian and Trinidad and Tobago players in particular warm towards this format.’

  The game also showcased the skills honed in grassroots level – often through windball, especially in Trinida
d, but sometimes in local T20 competitions. In Jamaica, which has also produced a number of leading T20 players, the local SDC T20 competition, which is community-based, features around 300 teams.

  ‘There are intense, but for the most part friendly, rivalries and players take great pride in representing their communities,’ Cresser said. ‘Culturally, T20 is in many ways a better fit. People want to play.’

  Sean Newell, a cricket coach at Calabar High School in Jamaica, said there is a direct link between the nature of pop-up grassroots matches and T20 success. ‘It’s basically from our nature. The flamboyance is a result of the type and style of cricket that is played in our backyards and schools. It is more on an individual basis where we would rather hit boundaries rather than run singles. We pride ourselves on power hitting so the T20 would fit the West Indies more. We like to show off our strength, power and individualism.’

  The Stanford 20/20 permeated even the remotest areas of the Caribbean. While there were only six West Indies teams in first-class cricket – smaller islands were banded together to form teams – there were 19 teams in the first year of the Stanford tournament, giving opportunities to players from hitherto ignored territories. ‘He exposed a lot of young, raw talent by allowing every single island in the Caribbean to play as the national team in his Allen Stanford tournament,’ Ganga said.

  ‘Man, it was great because what he did too is give everybody an opportunity to win,’ recalled Virgil Browne, part of the Nevis side who, despite the island’s population of just 11,000, reached the semi-finals in the first Stanford 20/20 tournament. Nevis had the distinction of being the first team to top 200 in the competition: they made 213 in the quarter-final against Antigua. ‘Everybody was thinking 160 . . . When we broke that barrier against Antigua we were like yo, you gotta look out for these guys.’