By the end of next week the euphoria of the T20 will be turned into a crescendo and the Cup will be in the hands of the winner. It could be any of the top teams who have made it to the Super Eights.
I pray that Pakistan does it but my gut feeling says that it will be beyond them. So far they have been lucky and luck may favour them yet again. But sooner or later it has to run out.
They lack the muscle and that kind of killer instinct and finishing touch which champions possess and I fear that they have already scuppered that and their chances of holding the Cup are as little as my being named the new chairman of the selection committee.
The selection of the team initially was unimaginative and there crying foul after the horse has bolted is not easy to digest. Abdul Qadir is an honourable man and he should have given up his job much earlier, in fact before the team left these shores.
In my experience the newly-appointed selectors invariably come out with gale force, promising heaven and earth, and then start to act as poodles wagging their tails in front of their autocratic masters. This is something which has got to be argued when the competition is over.
For the moment, however, let me throw some light on this shortest-form of the game which has spread like a bush fire. Like most sports that we watch and play, the T20 version is also a British innovation and it has come up with a price for the hours of research that has gone into it since 1998.
With the dwindling gates in county matches, the first-class forum of 18 counties and the MCC met on many occasions to develop something to attract the crowd. But the idea was somehow shelved.
With gates not improving the idea was resurrected in 2001 backed by a substantial investment and research in which 4,000 face to face interviews revealed that about two third of the population had little interest in county cricket. Those interviewed were between 16-34 years of age. The first-class forum then voted in April 2002 by 11-7 in favour of the shortest form of cricket, with the MCC abstaining.
The first of the competition was played in July 2003 with Hampshire playing Sussex at Southampton. In all, there were 44 matches played. The final at Trent-Bridge at Nottingham between Surrey and Warwickshire was won by Surrey who became the first champions of Twenty20. I covered that game which was packed to capacity besides being highly entertaining.
For the first time in a cricket match, there were dug-outs, loud speakers, bouncing castles and face paintings for children and all that goes with a carnival-like occasion.
The ECB's research budget of 200,000 pounds and an investment of another 250,000 pounds on marketing had come to fruition. For the game a new era had begun as it caught the imagination of young and old.
The appeal of that inaugural T20 season was such that now millions are at stake. India's IPL and ICL have cashed on it and so have the cricketers who may never have earned that much amount of money for contributing so little.
Its popularity now does not seem to fade away as was predicted by the purists. In fact the craze has turned into a hysteria as even old an infirm watch this brand of cricket. May be they find a lot more excitement in watching the dancing girls and cheer leaders than the game itself.
I am certain that if there were 'Dholakiyas', as we saw Pakistan's recent T20 domestic competition in Lahore moving their torsos like a dancing camel, the following of this game would not have been even half of what it is today. The 'tamasha' as many consider it at least raises your blood pressure.
In the year 2006, the editor of the Wisden Mathew Engel, after being convinced that this form of cricket is going to stay, wrote in his editor's column “The beauty of Twenty 20 does not derive only from its brevity, though it does fit nicely into normal schedules; you can do a day's work and still watch the match. Right now, it remains novel for the players as well as the spectators. Nobody yet knows what they are doing; each man is trying new ideas and different techniques and conventional wisdom is being turned on its head all the time.”
“That at least makes it fresh and vibrant. Let's just hope that it stays that way. While it does a World Twenty 20 is something even the traditionalists should support. If the format is sensible.”
He is now a convert to this form of cricket, I suppose, although I do not know if I am at this stage.