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In the end, neither Kevin Pietersen nor Craig Kieswetter swatted the winning runs in the World T20 final. A man with a much more traditionally English name, Paul Collingwood, completed the run chase begun by three South African-born batsmen. Collingwood was English in another way: dour, straightforward, a bits-and-pieces player with determination, exactly the sort of player the Twenty20 format needs. Is it ironic, then, that it is under a captain not of the hyper-intellectual, aristocratic tradition of English captains — Brearly, Atherton, Vaughan, Hussain — that the English team have finally won an ICC trophy?Perhaps not. The English team we saw in the Caribbean has a dash and Southern-hemisphere flair, that isn't just because of English cricket's liberal immigration policies — though those give them an edge. Nor is it because Australia's long domination has forced everyone to raise and alter their game. No, there's a different story here, about how cricket — T20 cricket — came to be; and this is a story that doesn't have Lalit Modi in it. A ban on tobacco advertising ended, in 2002, the run of the Benson & Hedges Cup, a one-day cricket tournament between county cricket clubs. The ECB needed a replacement, one that would pep the game up, bring football-mad younger people in; they decided on the radical T20 experiment. Within a year, Lords' first T20 game saw more people attending than had attended a county cricket match since 1953.So the English welcome international talent. They invented T20, and appear to have mastered the format. They reinvigorated their domestic game, ensured county associations have more money, and made it a fun night out, with the music and spectacle that the IPL has now supersized. We might need to rethink our old image of English cricket — stodgy and proper, with white men in old school ties applauding unenthusiastically in well-appointed clubhouses.
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