Don't bother having a look, lad...

At the end of the sixth over in their game against Rajasthan yesterday, Kings XI were 77-1. It would be easy to pass this off as symptomatic of one of the many warping forces T20 is applying in its first era.

Yet it hints at something more fundamental. In distilling the game down to an extreme form, conventional wisdoms will be challenged. Just as it won't be long until the very fastest spells of bowling come routinely in T20, so the paradigms that have contained the way batsmen bat will shift.

One of the most beloved of those wisdoms, passed down through generations, is to 'play yourself in, son. Have look'. Lara always said, 'the first hour belongs to the bowler'. The first hour? When Sehwag bats, the first ball doesn't always belong to the bowler.

Playing yourself in is a convention from time past, when the game was slower and longer, when conditions and expectations were different. It's also a psychological state: the nerves and fear dissipate once you've batted for a while and have a few runs on the board.

What there isn't, though, is a physical reason why you should have to play defensively when you first bat. If you have the skill and training to hit a ball, there's no limit on when you're able to do it. The brain and eye are more than capable of assessing external conditions immediately, otherwise you wouldn't be able to make the fine motor adjustments needed to play defensively, either.

What's coming is a generation of players with a new skill set and a different expectation of the possible. If they have a look in any format, it probably won't be in the way we know it now.

T20 is the future of fast bowling freaks: all aboard

Peter Roebuck hooks his wagon to the fast bowling in T20 theory, albeit at far greater length.

I've seen the future and it works...

So Rajasthan Royals didn't bother running their franchise plans by anyone. Welcome to the future my friends, a future in which the gloves are off. 

Without blowing my own trumpet - oh alright then, blowing my own trumpet - some years ago I sat in a meeting about a certain football club's pre-season tour [translation: coffer-filling third-world smash-and-grab] and heard lots of waffle about 'global reach' and 'brand extension'. I offered up the idea that all of these huge teams should stop fannying about buying feeder clubs and going on tours and just franchise themselves to developing leagues, which, by definition, had no deep-rooted tribal loyalty to the local teams. Thus Manchester United or AC Milan or Barcelona or whoever could have five or six sides playing all over the world: imagine 'Manchester United Japan' and 'Manchester United Australia', or 'AC Milan USA'. The clubs get to sell loads of shirts and have loads of players and the locals get a league with an immediate identity and history. It looked like a no-brainer.

The Royals have beaten them to the punch. But that is not the real battle here - the real battle is between domestic and international cricket. As Shane Warne and many others have said, T20 should be a domestic game. In a globalised market, we are watching the creation of of club brands that might one day operate alongside international teams and play at the same level.

The boards hate it of course, not for any purist reasons but because it will deny them money, at least in the short term.

But in the spirit of the football franchise idea, here's a blueprint: T20 becomes a domestic game. Test cricket remains the pure form. Fifty-over ODI cricket is ditched. In its place comes T40, a two-innings T20 game played only at international level, offering a tactical dimension not available to the club teams and a natural progression for young players. 

Cricket boards of the world - you can have that idea. Cheques to the email address to your right...

Things we have learned from SA vs Eng Pro20

1. South Africans still call Twenty20 Pro20. As opposed to Amateur20, presumably [insert own England joke here].

2. Graeme Smith and Alistair Cook were both left-handed openers and [for one game] captains. The similarities ended there.

3. Graeme Smith's technique shouldn't work, but does. Saj Mahmood's technique should work, but doesn't.

4. Strike rates of 200+ will soon be de rigeur.

5. Eion Morgan will probably find that his sixes are called DLF Maximums at certain magical times of the year.

6. He might be the first England batsman to make the Test team based on T20 form. He averaged 23 in first class cricket for Middlesex last season. In division two.

7. That might not be a bad thing.

8. Duckworth-Lewis still doesn't seem to work properly for T20. England felt way more than one run ahead in the first game.

9. Alistair Cook could one day actually cry in a post match interview.

10. Andy Flower does seem to know what's wrong. 

KP: Bittersweet symphonies

There's a scene in Jurassic Park that might put you in mind of Kevin Pietersen. It's the bit where one of the renegade scientists lost in the woods thinks he has escaped from a young raptor only to see the thing appear right beside him. Realising he's been booby-trapped and is just about to die, he looks at the beast almost admiringly and says, 'oh, clever boy...'.

Pietersen has all of the awesome solipsism of the predator, and his evolutionary path is similarly straight; he's not here to admire the view. He has done nothing but move forwards throughout his career. The one arena he has yet to dominate is Twenty20 cricket; he hasn't yet worked out how it relates to him. 

Like a lot of players he didn't grasp its appeal straight away, he though it was just a bit of hit and giggle under the lights. That was okay, he's a batsman not a trendspotter, but by the time he realised he needed to take it seriously it had gotten out ahead of him. Initially unconvinced, he's been unconvincing ever since.

He hasn't been helped by playing almost all of his T20 cricket for England, who are so far behind the evolutionary curve it's embarrassing, and it's not something that shows up in his figures. It's more evident in the rhythm of his batting.

Pietersen's best innings are like symphonies, they roll and swell, they are sometimes becalmed, and they move to his internal motion. He seems to realise instinctively what he has to do and when, and he likes the timing of the game to expand and contract with him. He plays his worst when he's uncertain of what's required. Batting at three [and usually in early] he hasn't really worked out how long twenty overs can be.

Maybe because his gut reaction to T20 is that it's a gimmick, he reaches early for the gimmicky shots, too. It's almost as though he feels beholden to them, rather than to his greatest strengths, which are his power down the ground and over midwicket. We've seen less and less of those two shots, mainly because he seems to mishit them more often and get caught. Perhaps he doesn't practice them as hard now.

The IPL should reshape him. It will make him think clearly, and it will offer him access to people who really understand the format. The conventional wisdom is that this will benefit England too, but KP's kneejerk response to mediocrity is to get pissed off and withdraw, bearing his cross and chewing the inside of his cheek.

He will be back from South Africa a better player. Flower and whoever the captain is going to be might want to start considering the implications of that. 

SWOT analysis required, chaps...

Infernal affairs

132 years to the day since England contrived to bring Test cricket to the world - and lose at it of course - there they were again, demonstrating to everyone exactly how far they've come in another format that originated here, Twenty20. And the answer was...

Andrew Strauss's kit was 'lost' (read: 'we had absolutely no idea he'd ever play another T20') and so he wore Matt Prior's. Right shirt, wrong player. Expediency, as ever, rules.

Strauss is, technically, England's fourth T20 captain in 18 games, although the sequence is illuminating: From the first match in 2005 (glorious, glowing herald of the Ashes that it became), it runs Vaughan, Strauss, Strauss, Vaughan, Collingwood  (for the next 10 games), Pietersen, Pietersen, Pietersen, Strauss.  

Forty-three players have represented England in those 18 matches. Twelve of those have played only once, eight twice, seven three times, four four times and two five times. Only eight players have appeared in more than half the games.

Amongst the forty-three are six wicketkeepers - Jones, Nixon, Read, Mustard, Prior and Davies - and 14 opening batsmen - Trescothick, Jones, Strauss, Bell, Joyce, Vaughan, Cook, Prior, Maddy, Wright, Solanki, Mustard, Davies and Bopara - who have appeared in twelve separate combinations. The longest-running was between Bell and Prior, which lasted three games. England began the match in Trinidad with Bopara and Davies, neither of whom had opened for England before. 

Of the 18 T20 matches that England have played, they've won eight and lost 10, but three of the wins came against Middlesex, Trinidad and Tobago and Zimbabwe. Now there will be more upheaval as it becomes apparent that they can't carry Strauss. No-one needs a Brearley in T20. 

One man yet to appear alongside storied T20 names like Schofield, Dalrymple, Lewis, Trott, Batty, Yardy, Strauss, Snape, Cook etc: Graham Napier (highest score 152, career strike rate 154.72, total sixes 37, best bowling 4/10, economy rate 7.09, ave. 19.07). 

Champagne super-over

The Guardian ran Andy Bull's piece with Harold Pinter today, an interview that turned out to be Pinter's last. The great playwright was talking about his lifelong love of the game. 'Drama happens in big cricket matches,' he said, 'but also in small cricket matches'. 

He was talking about 'big' and 'small' in terms of pro and amateur, but the dramas that appealed to his gimlet eye were the ones that came along ball by ball, with their capacity to provoke instant and overwhelming emotion. 

Dramas don't get much shorter than the super-over shoot-out between West Indies and New Zealand, an event Pinter didn't quite live to see but most probably would have been stirred by. It was the game squeezed down to its smallest unit, a reduction that should have been absurd, but that turned out to be glorious.

Chris Gayle hit Daniel Vettori, who had match figures of 4-0-16-3, for 25. By any measure it was superlative batting, not a contraction of the game but an expansion of it, an expression of what's possible.