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Sports correspondent & historian with |
The smash-and-bash vitality of T20 cricket is about to hit Blake Park early next week, albeit in a more compact form than usual.
Northern Districts Cricket has transferred its T20 Super Smash Minor Association competition north from the traditional base at Taupō to the Bay Oval and the two other Blake Park wicket blocks.
Bay of Plenty will join Northland, Counties Manukau, Hamilton, Waikato Valley and an ND XI in head-to-head competition to determine who will lift aloft the Super Smash trophy in triumph.
The competition kicks off on Sunday afternoon to allow teams to travel after Saturday club cricket. The opener and two matches a day on Monday and Tuesday will turn the tournament into a survival-of-the-fittest contest to find the best-prepared side.
The coming together of Northern Districts senior representative teams at the same venue dates back some 40 years, where sides would complete back-to-back two-day competition encounters.
Two-day Fergus Hickey Rosebowl cricket was put aside in favour of one-day matches, before the introduction of the T20 game at the annual gathering of ND representative teams.
T20 Cricket has changed the face of the game in just two decades. The England and Wales Cricket Board introduced a Twenty20 County competition in 2003.
Few fans would have realised the impact the short form of the game would make. In the early days, it was seen as a poor relation behind test and ODI cricket.
Introduction of the IPL (Indian Premier League) in 2008, with the moneyed franchises willing to pay whatever it took to secure their chosen stars of the game, saw T20 enter the cricket stratosphere.
Ramp shots, huge sixes, attacking bowling and spirited defence of the boundary were transferred to the two other forms of the game.
Australian Men’s and Women’s Big Bash grabbed the attention of Aussie cricket fans and created a further worldwide audience.
New Zealand Cricket legend Martin Crowe can be credited with one of the concepts of all-action cricket. A few years before the new millennium Crowe came up with Cricket Max.
Teams had two innings of 10 (8-ball) overs and shots played into a Max Zone behind the bowler counted double, turning fours into eights and sixes into 12s.
Crowe’s philosophy was “to provide spectators and television viewers with a game of cricket that was short in duration, very colourful, kept some old traditions and highlighted the best skills in the game”.
Having found an audience in New Zealand, Crowe tried to take the game global with the Max Blacks playing the English Lions in a three-match series in 1997.
Cricket Max combined with an Aussie short form of the game called Super Eights in an international tournament held in Kuala Lumpur. Super Max Eights was endorsed for a time by the ICC in 1999 as the “official third generation game”. Cricket Max petered out when Twenty20 debuted in England, backed by a marketing blitz.
Next week’s T20 games at the Bay Oval will see the best amateur cricket players from the Northern Districts Cricket region endevouring to impress for higher honours, along with a smattering of NZC Major Association team members and maybe a Black Cap or two.
Local cricket fans in search of in-your-face cricket action should make a bee-line for the Bay Oval next Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
