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 If you are confused about this new distraction called Twenty20, it does help that bewilderment is rampant. Make a note of these points of confusion, as you join the big conversation on T20’s potential to change cricket as we know it. They help consolidate the magic of a very special moment in the game’s growth.

Recall India’s match against South Africa on Thursday. The South African chase had only just begun when M.S. Dhoni summoned Dinesh Karthik to replace him behind the stumps. What’s going on, gasped a commentator (one among a group of veterans like Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, David Lloyd and Nasser Hussain). Dhoni’s got a measure of the track, offered another, he reckons he will have to share the fifth bowler’s burden. Maybe, wondered yet another among them, in this format of the game he feels he can captain better from the field. Only Hussain, perhaps with the benefit of four years of T20 in England, was unnerved by this calm acceptance of Dhoni’s seemingly inscrutable move. As it happened, they missed the obvious answer, one they would have intuitively grasped if a five or one-day match were in progress. The Indian skipper had back pain and was taking advantage of the presence of another keeper in the playing eleven.

But that’s Twenty20. These past days, as our parks and public spaces have drained of urban residents at match time, the bewilderment has been a fascinating side attraction.

Cricket administrators, bemused by their own failure to anticipate this popularity, have been urging moderation. Keep a check on the number of T20s, is the official and unreasoned word of caution from the ICC and the BCCI — presumably in a bid to keep intact their pre-planned calendar of international tours.

And in a democratisation that T20 promises to set off at various levels of cricket, expert and viewer are bound together in asking the most bizarre of questions: will batsmen suddenly accomplished in gaining strike rates well in excess of 100 per cent be able to temper their game for longer innings? Will we, the viewers, lose capacity to meditate over the finer moments in the slowly unfolding grand narrative of a Test — or, now with idea of time changed by acquaintance with T20, even one-day — match? Will skiers be the measure of batting excellence? Will bowlers be condemned to two-digit economy rates? Is cricket, gasp, dead?

There you have it. When cricket’s new new thing baffles us by its very success, you know all’s well. Change has traditionally served cricket favourably. The hastened pace of limited-overs cricket had by the mid-nineties forced not just a demand by viewers for more results in Tests. It made players skilled in scoring faster — Australia routinely score at 4 runs an over in Tests, far higher than the run rate in the 1983 World Cup final at Lord’s.

But faster scoring has not shortened matches. It has instead made teams aspire to larger innings totals; a team innings of 400 is no longer seen as an accomplishment and batsmen have acquired the stamina for bigger centuries. One-days have also made cricketers impatient with defensive play. The consequence is visible everywhere. Audiences are back at Tests, many of them new recruits via one-days.

Similarly, when a squad know they have managed more than 200 runs in 20 overs, a psychological barrier is overcome — getting 400 in the course of 50 overs will surely appear more of a possibility.

T20 is in fact just an incremental innovation over one-days. From Test to one-days was a more basic shift. In Tests, for victory ten wickets have to be captured twice over. In one-days, only the final tally of runs determines victory. T20 alters one-days only in terms of the total number of overs available for each innings and some fielding regulations — besides taking away the possibility of a tie, with a bowl-out.

Yet T20 will change cricket. It will change the state of play, and it can — if its nascent appeal is adequately heeded — temper the excesses of contemporary cricket.

The game. Contrary to fears that cricket matches are becoming mindless slog-fests, T20 intensifies scrutiny of the game. Every delivery matters, every shot, every catch, every dive. With such little scope to make amends, freeloaders are caught out immediately.

Remember John Wright’s wry observation that the way limited-overs cricket was headed, any day now all eleven players would be picked for their batting. Most teams already go into ODIs with just four regular bowlers, even three. T20 has reversed that. The last fortnight in South Africa has shown that amongst well-matched teams the fifth bowler matters.

Also, in these early days of T20, with abbreviation increasing chances of unexpected brilliance from lesser rivals, teams will have to plan for every eventuality. They will have to enlarge their pool of probables. In that sense, the playing field is being flattened — for aspirants like Rohit Sharma determined to make good with the first chance, and for teams like Zimbabwe counting on discipline to give nothing away and seize on the opposition’s lapses. And joyous result: this intra- and inter-team flattening of the game brought to last night’s final Indian and Pakistan teams so radically transformed after their premature exit from the Caribbean World Cup.

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.