Sideshow to money-spinner: The rise and rise of T20 cricket
cricket has gone from being a light-hearted sideshow to a money-spinning, central plank of the sport's global calendar. With the eighth T20 World Cup starting in Australia on Sunday, AFP Sport looks at the rise and rise of the game's big-hitting, crowd-pleasing format. The end of the Benson and Hedges Cup one-day competition in 2002, due to a ban on tobacco advertising, left a gap in English cricket's domestic calendar. Stuart Robertson, the marketing manager of the England and Wales Cricket Board, proposed a 20-overs-per-side event, a format already known in amateur and junior cricket. The aim was to attract a younger audience who might not have the time to engage with longer formats.
The first official Twenty20 county matches took place in 2003 and proved an instant success in terms of attracting crowds. More than 27,000 turned up to see Middlesex play Surrey at Lord's, the largest attendance for any county game at the "home of cricket" outside of a one-day final since 1953. That success was noted elsewhere, with the frenetic pace and dynamic hitting of batsmen proving popular with spectators worldwide. Yet there was still a sense this was not "proper cricket".
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The first international T20 match between New Zealand and Australia at Eden Park, Auckland, in 2005 saw both teams clad in retro 1980s kits, with New Zealand decked out in an exact replica of their "Beige Brigade" colours of that era. Some players even wore fake beards and moustaches in honour of styles of that time. "I think
