2020

Nah, I am not gonna talk about the Twenty20 WorldCup here. Thats for some other day. And before you start thinking, no, it isnt any review of Kalam Sir's India 2020.

While watching the recently concluded Twenty20 WorldCup, I was so very much reminded of the "street cricket" we used to play while at school. This form of cricket, usually played in streets or small grounds, or backyards could be played with teams of any number of players. Me, actually played a lot of matches with a one man team.

You dont need any great pitch for these matches. Any small strip of almost plain ground or even a cement track or footpath in your backyard can very well serve as a pitch. Some small cracks here and there on the pitch can add that extra spin to the balls being balled. Its the unexpected spin and swing that adds more fun to such games.

You dont even need a huge open space. Infact, the less open the space, the more fun. You can have a wall as your boundary. You can hit it first bounce for a six, but if you hit over the wall you are out :D.

On streets, you can have plenty of stand-by fielders. For instance, the cars and carts parked on the road. They come in handy as the batsmen cannot sneak an easy run.

In your backyards, you can have the trees and flower pots as your strong fielders. Ofcourse, if you play matches where the only runs you can score are that of 4s and 6s, then these trees are a great help to the fielding team.

There are many ways in which you can get out. Its not just by being bowled, or run-out [ always the most controversial way to get out ], or by getting caught, but also by getting caught after the ball bounces once. With trees and cars acting as your fielders, its even more fun, since the ball can bounce on them and you can still be caught out !!! Hitting outside the ground premises is usually declared as out and not a sixer.

Having proper stumps is a luxury !! Any wooden plank or wall with stumps drawn in the most artistic ways can be your stumps for the game. To avoid any controversies, people even go for full colored rectangle box drawn on the walls, so that they can confirm being bowled out by verifying the color on the ball :-)

Why stumps, sometimes, even having a proper ball is a luxury. You can play with your home made cork ball, or a rubber ball, or even a good hard plastic ball, especially in closed surroundings. Any deformities or cracks in the ball add more fun and spice with both the bowler and the batsman unaware of how the ball is gonna bounce :D If you can figure out a way to make the ball fool the batsman by making it pitch on a particular place, or in a particular angle, you can reap great benefits from it.

At times, these matches can also be played under lights, not exactly flood lights, but even street lights, or a room with some bulbs in it will also do. Teams usually go for such extreme conditions just because of bad climatic conditions, with heavy winds or rain making it difficult to decide the winner for that match.

Tournaments are usually played on a daily basis, with each match lasting only for a limited overs of 3 to 4 overs a side. With only 2 teams playing in the tournament, its usually the team that wins the most number of matches among all the matches played on that given day, thats declared as the winner. When both the teams have more time to play, the winning team usually proposes to extend the tournament by 1 or 3 more matches, thus giving the losing team equal chance to bounce back.

Apart from rekindling my interest in cricket, this Twenty20 tournament brought back all those good old days of cricket we played. So bad, those days feel like centuries away ...