Unthinkable? Well, so you might have thought about 20-overs-a-side international cricket as recently as five years ago. But, from all indications — not the least the passionate involvement of the crowds in South Africa — the International Cricket Council’s inaugural Twenty20 event is a roaring success.

While unreconstructed purists might dismiss it as an egregious spectacle and scornfully turn their eyes away from television screens, with scantily clad dancers in gaudy tights vying for the attention of the cameras with batsmen taking pyrotechnics to their outrageous limits, the fact is T20 is here to stay.

For, the shortest version of the game has arrived at the right time and at the right place — at the crossroads where cricket and commerce meet for mutual gratification.

In a larger sense, a cultural threshold may have been crossed in the world of cricket. The coup that one day cricket threatened, but mostly failed to accomplish, has been pulled off by T20 _ which is to convince the great sport that it will be in its own best interests to divorce its long-time consort, its own soul.

In our dizzyingly accelerated 21st century culture, with hugely reduced attention spans, cricket, soulless as it may be, has no option but to warmly embrace the logic of the marketplace even if many self-appointed arbiters of taste choose to stay put on their high horses, crying hoarse about the dumbing down of a much-cherished culture.

But, then, it is a culture that traces its roots back to the high noon of the Empire, to leisurely Victorian-era days. The world has come a long way since then and we cannot high-mindedly yet wrong-headedly pretend that the values of that long gone era are still dear to us.

What is more, the seemingly sacred values we attach to the social institution of cricket are merely social constructs. Right through human history, cultural evolution — whether it is in pop culture or high culture — has been simultaneously welcomed and resisted and there has always been a continuous re-evaluation of values. Cricket alone cannot escape this inexorable process.

Of course, to many a cricket lover, the game may be much more than a game. He/she might actually find a deeper meaning in it and see the sport in its original form as a glorious symbol of a higher set of values. This is individual choice.

But, as a popular sport with a mass following, cricket has to change with the times; and change it will even as many of us continue to shed angry rivers of tears over its metamorphosis into a rather banal three-hour entertainment package.

What T20 is also likely to do is to make for a level playing field. This is already obvious from the loss suffered by a rusty Australian side against a beleaguered Zimbabwe team and Bangladesh’s entry into the Super Eight stage of the competition.

All this is possible because there is no room in T20 for subtleties, scant reward for artistry and patience and no time for the batsmen to think, for the captains to read situations and plan the course of a match midway in an innings. Everything is a blur. Instincts take over. It is cricket’s version of bare-knuckle boxing in a bar-room with the lights switched off.

Essentially, T20 is cricket stripped to its bare minimum, rid of all its finery, robbed of its regal robes, all this not so much revealing its soul as its raw flesh, warts and all.

If Test cricket was decked up in an Armani three-piece suit and the 50-overs game was cricket in jeans and T-shirt, then T20 is the sport presented in its underwear.

Then again, cricket in its new avatar fits wonderfully in the cultural canvas of the iPod generation. For, T20 — as loud, garish, inelegant, unsubtle and breathless as it may be to older eyes and ears — is just the sort of membership badge that cricket needs to wear to endear itself to the busy, impatient members of the Dashing-into-our-digital-future club.

Yes, we have seen the future of cricket. And yes, it works. Unfortunately, some might think.

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