It's not loud enough to be an explosion, more like a rumble. It's not bright
enough to be a beacon, more like a little firefly. But it is there. The first
generation of players who used 20-overs cricket as a platform to showcase itself
has started breaking into Test teams. And it has taken less than five years. I'm
not saying it's a trend - there aren't enough points on the graph yet to make
that kind of projection - but let's face it, we thumbed our noses at Twenty20,
yet there is more to the kid than we care to see. This week David Warner played
his first Test for Australia, after being labelled a slogger early in his
career. Enough people who understood the game said Warner had it in him to adapt
to Test matches, but few took him seriously Cigarette Tobacco For Sale, and he has
admitted he thought a slogger was the kind of player he might be. Warner has now
scored back-to-back hundreds in T20 and produced an eight-hour innings. There is
food for thought there. Meanwhile, R Ashwin has taken 22 wickets in his first
three Tests and produced a solid Test hundred. Yes, he did play Ranji Trophy
cricket for Tamil Nadu Cheap Cigarettes Free
Shipping, yes, he has 130 first-class wickets, but it was the composure he
showed with the new ball while playing for the Chennai Super Kings that
separated him from the other challengers. Like with Warner, Ashwin's success in
20-overs cricket was proclaimed as the reason he may not be able to play longer
cricket Newport Cigarettes Carton Price.
But he can bowl long spells, bat for long periods, and, ironically, his only
weakness at the moment is that he isn't athletic enough, one of the talents
considered mandatory for T20. Maybe sometimes, like bad scientists, we generate
our hypotheses first and then go searching for observations Marlboro Cigarettes. Instead, if, like
good researchers, we merely noted observations and looked for patterns therein
to frame a hypothesis, we might look at the world differently. We might still
find that Warner and Ashwin are exceptions, but that we need to assess before we
condemn. Why, look at the way we talk about T20 and Test cricket: can a player
come down to T20 Marlboro Cigarettes,
we ask; can he move up to Test cricket, we wonder. Either way, it's about
adapting your game. Fine feature-film directors have made excellent 30-second
commercials. The great AR Rahman was first spotted as a young man, composing
jingles Wholesale Cigarettes. By the same
token, I know of a sensitive film-maker whose opening shot for an ad film was a
slow 30-second sweep. And we now know that masters of the throwaway one-liner
can come a cropper when asked to be part of a two-hour story. So it can work
both ways; it's not that one is bad and the other good. What is unmistakable,
though, is that T20, because of its popular appeal, is becoming a vehicle to get
noticed. Shane Watson's return from injury was dramatically visible during his
extraordinary first season with the Rajasthan Royals; Eoin Morgan's unorthodox
strokeplay caught the eye in limited-overs cricket; and Australia's Callum
Ferguson might well benefit from this visibility too, as Ravindra Jadeja and
Virat Kohli did. Over the next couple of years it will be interesting to see how
cricket society treats those who cannot adapt. Kieron Pollard and Suresh Raina
have been magnificent in T20 (Raina is a fine one-day cricketer too), but have
struggled to make an impact in Test cricket. In the same way, Dale Steyn and
Zaheer Khan in T20 are fractions of the cricketers they are in Test cricket. And
Dwayne Bravo is an example of a fine Test cricketer in the making, who, through
injury, but I suspect also through inclination, is now consistently good enough
only in the shortest form. I have often felt that in the years to come, we, or
later historians, will look back at this era as one of defining change. Those
wisps of smoke we see might just be concealing a conflagration. On the other
hand, they might just be emerging from tiny embers. But we need to observe with
an open mind.
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