Back to the future: Punjab Kings and the romance of the heroic failure

Batters go on the attack from the start and continue attacking regardless of the state of the innings

When 20-over cricket began, it was seen as a game that was a bit of a hit-and-giggle (not unlike when the 50-over game made its bow), with the odds heavily in favour of the batter. You went out, you hit out, and that was that. Subtlety was for the birds.

In the early years, that pretty much summed up team strategy. Both players and coaches were working things out as they went along. Tactics that seemed to be working in one match came a-cropper in the next. But a hierarchy of dismissals soon evolved.

Given the choice between getting caught near the boundary off a hefty hit, and being leg before in defence, there seemed to be something honourable in the former. You had died trying. It was the romance of the heroic failure.

Then came the phase where strategy included taking a delivery or three to get your eye in (as even the kingpin Chris Gayle did), and preserving wickets for the final onslaught. This seemed illogical at the time, an idea borrowed from the early days of the 50-over game. The difference was that batters developed the instinct to get the front foot out of the way to give themselves a wider swinging arc. But T20 had yet to find its own, unique style.

Meanwhile, bowlers developed strategies too. This was not merely a case of survival, it was the way cricket had evolved with first one side, either the batter or the bowler, surprising with a new trick, and then the other countering to neutralise that advantage.

Whether bowling or batting, you either defended or attacked — that was the essence of the game. But when to do what was knowledge that came with experience.

The yorker, the slower ball, and the varieties of deliveries developed by the spinners, all brought into the game the element of competition, with bowlers now coming into their own, something that was missing from the early days.