“The Benson & Hedges Cup, which the T20 championship replaced then, used to get crowds of just 500-1000 people. For T20 county games though, we started getting in five to six thousand people — and most were just general public buying tickets, as opposed to members just strolling in otherwise. So, financially, it had a big impact on the game here,” he told The Indian Express.

Did he know, then, that it would grow to such proportions in such a short time? “I’d be lying if I said I did. All credit to the Indian board and the IPL. But at the same time, I’m not really surprised.”

The story behind how they locked down on 20-overs-a-side is interesting. “We actually just worked backwards from what time we could play till. In the summers, we have daylight till about 8.30 pm. We wanted people to come in after work, so we had a window of about three hours. It wasn’t rocket science, really,” he said.

It wasn’t as if shorter formats of the game hadn’t been tried before. Super 6 contests used to draw sporadic interest while New Zealand really pushed hard to make Max Cricket popular. Max, a 10-over contest, had some interesting tweaks as well, like the Max Zone straight down the ground, where runs got doubled.

“Max cricket was too gimmicky. It was a different game,” Robertson said. “We never wanted T20 to be an end in itself, just the means to an end, which was getting people back watching cricket at the grounds. As far as our aims went, those new spectators would then, in turn, get attracted and addicted to the longer formats.”

... contd.