If cricket becomes part of Oly, let's have Tests and not T20

“If we are going to have cricket and tennis and golf and soccer in the Olympics, we may as well have tiddlywinks and darts and dominoes,”  Geoffrey Boycott. Cricket, if it does manage to make it back (it was part of the 1900 Paris Games) as one of the events at the greatest sporting spectacle on Earth someday, will almost certainly feature in its Twenty20 version. Now, one of the exciting things about the shortest (and most reviled) version of the game, apart from the RCB cheerleaders and Chris Gayle, is the undeniable fact that it is a great leveler. The likelihood of a less-than-established team upsetting the star-laden applecart of a frontrunner is highest in a Twenty20 match. You don’t have to be dedicatedly professional to win at the most curtailed form of the game. This is what makes Twenty20 cricket more interesting — to the layperson at least — than Test matches or 75 percent of a One Day International (ODI). Besides, unlike tiddlywinks, darts, dominoes, and golf, cricket is, relatively speaking, physically more demanding … unless you’re Munaf Patel or Virender Sehwag. Keeping all this in mind, perhaps cricket does make a better case for itself, than tiddlywinks certainly, as an Olympic sport. But then, the English, in general, don’t care much for Twenty20 cricket, and poor old Kevin Pietersen. [caption id=“attachment_414867” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Twenty20 cricket is a bit like introducing a category for ‘advertising commercials’ at the Oscars for, well, purely commercial considerations. Getty Images[/caption] Mary Lou Retton, the first female gymnast from outside Eastern Europe to win the Olympic all-around title said, “For athletes, the Olympics are the ultimate test of their worth,” which Twenty20 cricket is most definitely not. (Give or take someone like Ravindra Jadeja.) Twenty overs per side of hardly accomplished and oftentimes ugly cricket shouldn’t be the basis for deciding who is bestowed the honour of an Olympic medal. A diluted, adulterated, idiot-proofed version of the sport does not deserve to be showcased as the ultimate test of a cricketer’s ability. Even the ODI and Twenty20-hungry Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will admit the two aforementioned forms are not the most skilled avatars of the game. Less than committed cricketers can end up being quite successful in the shorter forms of the game. (Yeah, I’m talking to you Mr Rohit Sharma.) A precious Olympic medal for winning a bunch of Twenty20 matches just does not seem right. Abhinav Bindra, for one, would surely not approve. And seeing that Bindra is a sharp-shooter, not to mention far-from-chuffed with all the attention India pays to cricket, it might be best not to upset him. Jokes apart, Olympic medals handed out (and ‘handed out’ would be a much more apt word to describe the act than ‘awarded’) for Twenty20 cricket would be rather insulting to athletes from other disciplines who work their backsides off for years to medal (pardon the use of the word as a ‘verb,’ but it does seem to be the flavour of the month) in by far the most demanding examination of their sporting abilities. True, tennis and football events at the Olympics may not be as prestigious as the four Grand Slams or the Fifa World Cup, but at least they are not drastically shortened versions of the sport. Twenty20 cricket on the other hand is a bit like introducing a category for ‘advertising commercials’ at the Oscars for, well, purely commercial considerations. Honestly, the only form of cricket that deserves to be at the Olympics is the longest, most testing version of it. Boy, what a drag that might well turn out to be. Possibly, but by no means will Test cricket be more sleep-inducing than Olympic events like fencing, sailing, and the god-awful equestrian. What’s more, the introduction of Test cricket (since less than a handful of countries are any good at it) and, of course, chess, should be raucously welcomed by medal-starved Indians looking to add a metal, or two, to the country’s meager tally. And if cricket does return to the Olympics, the one thing we must never, ever, do is what Yang Jiechi, China’s foreign minister, asked of India after the Beijing Olympics. He said, “Beijing is a lucky place for India. Now you should teach us how to play good cricket.” You know what will happen once the Chinese take to it. The writer tweets @Armchairexpert. You can follow him if you’re into that sort of thing.