STUART ROBERTSON is the Twenty20 man. The monicker makes him sound like a superhero; he is not quite that, but his contribution to English cricket is incalculable. As the man whose research led to the 20-overs competition, he is now credited with invigorating the summer game.
Looking back it is hard to imagine that anybody thought otherwise. Yet seven counties — Middlesex, Sussex, Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Somerset, Glamorgan and Northamptonshire — voted against the proposal when it was adopted by the now-defunct First Class Forum (FCF) of the ECB in April 2002.
There is another peculiarity. Introducing Twenty20 is probably the best decision made by the ECB since its inception in 1997. But the four men who did most to see it through — Lord MacLaurin of Knebworth, the chairman, Robertson, the marketing manager, and John Read and Mark Hodgson in the corporate affairs team — have all since left the board.
Robertson traces Twenty20 to the late Nineties when he was working in the development office during one of the many periodic reviews of the game. “Cricket Max was having some success in New Zealand,” Robertson said. “It was a short game and an interesting idea but there was not much enthusiasm at the ECB at the time.”
By 2001, however, something clearly needed to be done to arrest declining attendances at county matches. Robertson’s first success was to gain approval for a wide-ranging canvass of the public. “It became apparent very quickly that there would be a demand for a shorter game as long as it was held at a convenient time,” Robertson said.
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“The idea of playing 20 overs a side was a natural development. I remember that early on we called it ‘Twenty20 short-form cricket’. I became associated with it because I gave a lot of presentations. I suppose I was the front man.”
Robertson remembers the FCF meeting that granted approval. “We went through the 18 counties in alphabetical order, starting with Derbyshire,” he said. “Some of them might have been suspicious because the idea was from the marketing side. It was touch and go, but thank God for the 11 who backed it.”
Now the head of marketing at Warwickshire, Robertson would prefer matches spread through the season on a regular day of the week instead of crammed into a short period, festival-style. He also thinks that some of the simplicity has been removed from the group stage this year. “But there is still so much potential with Twenty20,” he said.