I watched some highlights of the recent Ind Vs Eng ODI and it was not at all a pleasure to see bowlers having no role to play at all in the game. Many games in recent times, especially in India were about win the toss, chase and win. It does not matter any more if the side batting first scores 300, 350 or even 400. A decent batting side (leave alone India and Virat in his current form) can easily chase with few overs to spare.

This is not about how pure a form test cricket is or how much T20 has changed / polluted / corrupted the game. It is about every single person who is responsible for making rules, running the game and influential experts who believe that people only like to see batsmen hitting towering sixes. I don’t know how much of truth there is in the assumption, but I would like to believe that spectators in general will like to see evenly balanced and hard fought matches, be it in tests, T20 or ODI’s. I am as much as much a cricket expert as billion other Indians and somewhere I believe this madness will start delivering diminishing returns.

Every now and then, some ex players, experts and administrators come up and talk about the situation, but hardly anyone does anything reasonable to change. It is hard to believe that not even a single ex player, administrator or expert has come up with decent ideas to change ODI structure. They have tried super sub, tinkered with fielding rules and power plays etc. Instead, all they need is to bring balance to the game by allowing bowlers to come into play. I am not sure how hard is it to create minimum specs for boundary, allow 3 or 4 bouncers an over, leave flexibility to set fields to captains, get pitches that produce even support for bowlers and batsmen or even play with just one ball. Of the potential options, easier ones to manage are to allow more bouncers in an over and get good pitches (though not in today’s definition of good).

In the end, we have several ODI matches, but no contests. Create environment that throws serious challenges at the batsmen (chasing over 300 every other match cannot be one of them), and we will see some great contests.

Virat Kohli is a great batsman and is in kind of form that players can only dream of. But if things don’t change, it could soon be boring to see this great man batting.