SO what do u ppl think of this (new) version of the game ???
I mean is it to revolutionize Cricket like back in 1977 (i think) when Kerry Packer broke through with his idea of World Series Cricket to televise the game and give it a touch of professionalism (is this a word)
Maybe this short version of the game can help it enter the olympics (although i hardly can imagine cricket as an olympic game)???
It is starting next week and I will be watching the first game at Edgbaston between Warwick and Glamorgan. Hope to see Waqar in action and also will let you know how exciting or otherwise this form of the game is.
someone just explain the rules of this thing here....
Schedule
June
13
North
Durham v Nottinghamshire Chester-le-Street
Midlands/West/Wales
Somerset v Warwickshire Taunton
Worcestershire v Northamptonshire Worcester
South
Hampshire v Sussex Southampton
Surrey v Middlesex AMP Oval
14
North
Yorkshire v Derbyshire Leeds
South
Surrey v Essex Imber Court
Midlands/West/Wales
Gloucestershire v Worcestershire Bristol
16
North
Leicestershire v Yorkshire Leicester
Nottinghamshire v Lancashire Nottingham
Midlands/West/Wales
Glamorgan v Northamptonshire Cardiff
South
Kent v Hampshire Beckenham
Surrey v Sussex Imber Court
18 *Day/Night
North
Durham v Leicestershire Chester-le-Street
Midlands/West/Wales
Glamorgan v Somerset Cardiff
Worcestershire v Warwickshire WorcesterSouth
South
Hampshire v Essex Southampton
*Sussex v Middlesex Hove
19
North
Derbyshire v Nottinghamshire Derby
Lancashire v Yorkshire Manchester
Midlands/West/Wales
Gloucestershire v Northamptonshire Bristol
South
Middlesex v Kent Richmond
20
North
Leicestershire v Lancashire Leicester
Yorkshire v Durham Leeds
Midlands/West/Wales
Northamptonshire v Somerset Northampton
Warwickshire v Glamorgan Birmingham
South
Essex v Kent Chelmsford
21
North
Lancashire v Derbyshire Manchester
Nottinghamshire v Leicestershire Nottingham
Midlands/West/Wales
Somerset v Gloucestershire Taunton
South
Sussex v Essex Hove
23
North
Derbyshire v Durham Derby
Midlands/West/Wales
Glamorgan v Worcestershire Cardiff
Warwickshire v Gloucestershire Birmingham
South
Kent v Surrey Canterbury
Middlesex v Hampshire Uxbridge
24 *Day/Night
North
Lancashire v Durham Manchester
Leicestershire v Derbyshire Leicester
Yorkshire v Nottinghamshire Leeds
Midlands/West/Wales
Gloucestershire v Glamorgan Bristol
Northamptonshire v Warwickshire Northampton
Worcestershire v Somerset Worcester
South
Essex v Middlesex Chelmsford
Hampshire v Surrey Southampton
*Sussex v Kent Hove
July
19
Semi Final Nottingham
Final Nottingham
Wasim thirsty for Twenty20](BBC SPORT | Cricket | Wasim eager for Twenty20)
Former Pakistan star Wasim Akram has given his backing to the Twenty20 Cup ahead of its much-anticipated debut.
The new 20-overs-per-side competition gets under way with five matches on Friday.
“I think it is very exciting,” said Wasim, preparing for Hampshire’s home game against Sussex.
"It is a very good idea to get youngsters involved.
“The second step is to help them with coaching but first it is important to get them involved.”
Replacing the time-honoured B&H Cup, Twenty20 has been criticised because of its gimmicky format and thirst for quantity over quality.
Twenty20: Contrasting views
But Wasim disagrees, reckoning the players will take it seriously enough for it to become an established competition.
“In Pakistan, we have a 25-overs competition which all the top teams play and they take it quite seriously,” he added.
"It is all about promoting the game and trying to get youngsters in to play
Wasim Akram
“I am sure it will catch on.”
Wasim, with 502 wickets the all-time leading one-day wicket-taker, feels Hampshire have a real chance of lifting the Twenty20 Cup.
"We are a good team. We have some good all-rounders, the batting is getting better and all the boys are working very hard.
"I am really, really enjoying playing here and I have settled in very well.
“I have known some of the players for years and they are a very good team to play with.”
Hampshire signed Wasim this season following Shane Warne’s positive drugs test at the World Cup and subsequent one-year ban.
The left-arm paceman has been impressed by the set-up at Hampshire and believes the Rose Bowl is a ground worthy of Test status.
Wasim, who won 104 Pakistan Test caps, said: "I think the ground is beautiful. It could be another Test venue.
“The facilities are superb and it should definitely be a Test ground.”
It will b fun watching Wasim and Waqar:jhanda:…
Azhar made 43 off 18 balls for Surrey.
And topped it up with bowling of 4/20 off 3.4 overs.
If he repeats this performance on tuesday we might well beat England.
:k:
hopefully he keeps this form throughout the comming series and Pak may win it Inshallah
English wickets are heavenly and good morale-boosters for nippy seamers like Azhar.
Good to see he's grabbed the opportunity very well, not only for his own game - but earning a deserved recall to national colors. Let's hope he continues the good ride, insha'Allah.
Take me out to the ball game you silly midwicket
Finally a version of cricket that busy people like us can appreciate. Keep your tea in the pot and stuff your googly upyour bum. :snooty:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/27/international/europe/27CRIC.html
Cricket for Our Time: It’s Highly Condensed
By SARAH LYALL
ONDON, June 26 — Fiona Boddy believes herself to be a woman of unusual patience. Yet, years after the fact, she still remembers the paint-drying tedium of the cricket match she attended in which nothing appeared to happen for hours on end.
Cricket lovers acclaimed the day of play — part of a match that lasted five days and ended in a draw — as a masterly example of the sport at its tactical best (even with the breaks for rain), but not Ms. Boddy, 30, a public relations executive.
“I just sat there all day, and it was the most excruciating thing ever,” she said.
It was the promise of nonexcruciating cricket that brought Ms. Boddy and several thousand others to Richmond, West London, last week to watch the Middlesex Crusaders play the Kent Spitfires in a new, speeded-up kind of cricket that organizers hope will give this quintessentially old-fashioned sport a jolt of 21st-century excitement.
The new game, a shorter, snazzier version of traditional cricket (motto: “Twice the action, half the time!”), is being played in a monthlong tournament this summer by England’s 18 professional teams. While organizers are already praising its potential for attracting the disaffected masses, purists — and there are still many left — are horrified at what they consider the defilement of a sacred tradition.
“It’s sad to contemplate what’s happening,” said David Frith, former editor of the Wisden Cricket Monthly. “Cricket is meant to attract people who are said to be dreamy and poetic, liking the subtleties and depth of the game, but this is attracting people on the fringe who want something else.”
In the new version, the length of play has been drastically reduced, to a mere three hours, with strict limits on many times the ball can be thrown, or bowled, at the batters, who are known as batsmen. Players wait in baseball-style dugouts instead of lolling about in the nearby cricket pavilion and are required to jog, not amble, into position.
Some teams are luring spectators with clowns, pop singers, face-painting booths and even Jacuzzis; at the Middlesex game, thwarted batters were sent off, scandalously, to the strains of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”
“This is not decent cricket; it’s smash-grab cricket,” said Roger Jay, feeling increasingly dismayed as the game went on.
In 75 years as a cricket fan (he is 83), Mr. Jay has already weathered numerous destabilizing changes. First, there was the horror of one-day cricket, introduced in the early 1970’s as an acknowledgment that the traditional five-day international match, while still the Platonic ideal, was not practical (or even, strictly speaking, enjoyable) for most people.
Then there was the decision to replace classic cricket whites with colored uniforms for some games, a radical development Mr. Jay still derides as “pajama cricket.”
Cricket, which appears to resemble baseball but actually doesn’t, is undeniably an acquired taste. Its terminology is eccentric — the people standing in the field, for instance, are known by names like “fine leg” and “silly mid-off” — and its customs are taxing to the average sports fan. For instance, a batsman can bat for hours, sometimes scoring more than a hundred runs, sometimes scoring no runs at all. A match can last for five days, with one team scoring dozens more times than the other, and still end in a draw.
“You have to love the game to be able to stand it at all,” said Vasant Bhatt, 46, a florist in London, watching the Middlesex game.
In a recent survey, the England and Wales Cricket Board found that only 500,000 people here regularly go to cricket games. From 1997 to 2001, total attendance in county cricket matches declined by 17 percent, to 1,030,000. Last year, the shortest county match lasted a long time: 6 hours and 10 minutes.
“The whole theory was to offer a cricket product that people could come and watch who didn’t want to watch a 6-hour-10-minute game,” said Mark Hodgson, a spokesman for the cricket board. “We’ve condensed it into a shorter and more action-packed game, and hopefully some people will come along who haven’t wanted to come before.”
So far, so good. According to Vinny Codrington, chief executive of the Middlesex team, the take at the box office is generally about £2,000 — about $3,300 — for regular games. For the new, souped-up version, receipts were £20,000, not counting food and merchandise sales inside the gates.
Young women came, and so did young children, two groups that cricket is desperate to attract.
Even non-fans were hooked.
Karl Burgess, 34, is the sort of person, he said, who believes that “the best way to be involved with cricket is to flick the radio on every now and then and check the score.” Yet he loves the game, admires (in the abstract) its character-building tendency to delay gratification and came with his father and a friend to check out the new version.
Eating his packet of potato chips and drinking his pint of lager, he said he was greatly enjoying revved-up cricket, even when things looked pretty slow, at least to the untrained eye.
“You have to talk in degrees of excitement,” he said. “In cricket terms, this is exciting.”
Why dont they make the super sixes the standard. This aint cricket. It is crap.
Why don’t they name you the “chakka of the year”. 
Some things are better left unsaid, dear chanda.
Yeah i bet you learnt that in jail eh? Cricket is a sport of patience. You want fast and commercial action? Watch Baseball.
CM, I am offering you a chance in a lifetime. Take it dear boy..take it. Otherwise you would scratching your balls shining the big one.
How about i hit your balls out of the park?
As long as you can spit and shine them first. I am looking to get off.