Twenty20 (20 overs a side) cricket, first developed in England as games that are all over in three hours of floodlit razzle-dazzle, is at once a commercial phenomenon and a Frankenstein's monster. It threatened to get out of hand from the moment that India won the inaugural world competition in South Africa last October.
The huge sums generated by Indian television are a temptation for everyone, but if they undermine Test cricket by creaming off some of the best players, the game will be immeasurably the poorer.
Two Twenty20 leagues have been set up in India, one official and one unofficial. Shane Bond of New Zealand, one of the best fast bowlers in the world, has been banned by his own board because he has joined the unofficial Indian Cricket League. The Australians Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist, all recently retired, will bob up in India next April to play in the Indian cricket board's official tournament, and younger stars like Andrew Flintoff must be sorely tempted by the offer of more money for less work that has already been floated.
The Indian cricket board has earned US$ 1.7 billion before a ball has even been bowled in its approved league simply by selling television rights and franchises. Now they are busy recruiting, like Indian versions of Roman Abramovich. Players are expected to earn up to $500,000 for the first six-week staging of a league that clashes with the first two months of the season in England. That may be only part of additional sums from endorsements and prize money of at least $3 million.
Huge crowds everywhere for the Twenty20 game prove that this glittering, all-action product is more than just the flavour of the month. It has huge advantages in its brevity, but truly it is Winehouse compared with Wagner, McFly with Mozart. The longer two-innings version of cricket, the broader canvas, will always have more appeal to the sophisticated follower and player, and Test cricket is its apogee; but it will remain so only if it continues to be played between the best players.
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The other full member countries of cricket's world body, the International Cricket Council, were being as much pusillanimous as pragmatic when they backed the Indian board last year so that they could share in the profits from yet another tournament, the Twenty20 Champions League, to be contested between the champions of India, England, Australia and South Africa in October.
The initial success of these ventures is not in doubt but a new chief executive for the ICC is being chosen this week and when he starts work in July his first tasks will be first to retain control of the Frankenstein in Bombay and then to restrain the monster so that it does not unbalance the game irrevocably. We want Flintoff's first loyalty to be to England, not the Mumbai Maulers.