Thought #5 (update) — cricket, a reflection of our times
If you haven’t read my original article, “Thought #5 - cricket, a reflection of our times”, you can read it here.
Well what do you know, a new version of Cricket has emerged from the swamp of evolution. And what do you know, it’s shorter than the last.
Yep, Twenty20, the last inception of the game apparently is now too long for us. The ants have returned, and their biting. The kids are restless. Dad, this is sooooo boring!
The new version, coming soon to a town near you, is called 100-Ball-Cricket. The intention of the new version is to reduce the time to complete a match so the plebs have enough time to get home to watch Master Chef.
An even shorter version? That got me thinking,
how low can you go?
Well, let’s plot this…(yes, I plotted it)
On the y-axis you can see typical game play time in hours. Test Cricket, the original form of the game, has the potential to take 5 days to complete (35hrs). And as you can see, as we move forward through the years, new shorter versions of the game have emerged.
One Day, approx 8hrs, emerged in the 70s.
Twenty20, approx 4hrs, emerged in the early 2000s.
And now 100-Ball-Cricket, approx 2hrs game play, in 2020.
Now the question was, how low can you go? Well, at this rate, there won’t be cricket by 2040. Though thanks to the rules of exponential rates, we can never actually reach zero. Maybe 5 minute games by 2030 hehehe.
Now let’s not forget, the whole reason the game of Cricket keeps getting shorter and shorter is to cater for our shorter and shorter attention spans.
So what does that say about us?
It says that by 2040 we won’t have the patience to sit through one second of inactivity. Tap tap, chat, post, like, comment, watch, read, tag, insta, snap. emoji, cats……pause?..…dead.
Here is the graph, corrected…
I know it’s only 2020, but if you made it this far, well done. There is still hope.
