One-day cricket: where is it heading?

Gideon Haigh

The sums are as obscene as those of a CEO's salary: 595 deliveries for 872 runs, 504 of them, or 58 per cent, in the form of boundaries, including twenty-six sixes.  As Ed Craig observed on Cricinfo, New Wanderers has a bit of previous, and the absences of Pollock and McGrath disturbed the equilibrium of both sides. But to Australians waking this morning, 434 for 4 sounded more like a football formation than a cricket score, and news ofSouth African victory compounded the incredulity.

Whether the game was genuinely surprising is another matter.  One-day scores have been rising for years, as boundaries come in and bats hit further, and one need not expect the authorities to reverse the trend, for the pressure is on the 50-over game to rival the 20-over game's carnival feel. After all, as John Arlott observed: 'The big hit – for six – is the most companionable of cricketing acts.  Casting the unfortunate bowler in the role of clown, it infallibly puts the crowd in a satisfied, laughing mood.'  Expect more conical hats for bowlers as they hand out more helmets to spectators. The time may not be far off when bowling is simply mechanized, with a sponsored machine called the AutoLewis programmed to spit out six half-volleys an over.

Is this sustainable?  Most of the time when a team posts a huge tally in a fifty-over match, the opposition loses early wickets in a headrush of testosterone and folds up soon after: bigger scores beget bigger margins.

It is middling scores that tend to generate the close finishes which are the game's sine qua non.  Still the best one-day game I have ever seen was between these two countries six and a half years ago at Headingley where the ball was in the ascendant for most of the day, and the fate of the match seemed to hinge on every ball. The effect of the turbo-charging of batting and the malcolmnashisation of bowling, then, may be more one-sided games. If so, the fifty-over game may be about to reverse sweep the ball right into its own goolies.

Gideon Haigh is an Australian-based cricket historian and author. He writes for The Age and Cricinfo.com among others