To one-day and Tests, then, T20 should transfer greater accountability and alertness to detail. To the stadium attending public, in turn, T20 could deliver a respect taken away in recent years by cricket boards’ reliance on lucrative telecast rights. T20 is a spectacle, its charged pace appears to need the participation of the spectator, with the music, dancing, and eccentric endorsement through, for instance, designer helmets. Boards, especially in the subcontinent, have felt no need to work enough to make the spectator comfortable, gate fee is so minuscule compared to television rights. Now, if television demands the spectator’s approval, in a neat reversal, the administrators will have to take note.

Still scared of Twenty20? Wisden Cricket Monthly received a letter from Milton Keynes four years ago, when the format was first introduced in England. The writer parodied worries being tossed around of the long-terms effects of a batsman getting away with 30-ball half centuries. To traditionalists, he offered a suggestion. As an antidote to the Twenty20 poison, he said, institute 10-day Test “Blockathons”, in which any team that scores over two runs an over would be heftily fined.

In other words, you can’t fight the game.