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[jamesisapayne]

I actually think the 3 formats we have work well.

Test
I love the chess-like twists and turns of the long format, how a game can ebb and flow and what seem like tiny moments at the time can have a huge impact on the game. Test cricket is simply that, a test of your patience, your technique, your mental ability and much more.

One Day
I quite enjoy 50 overs as you can get a decent cricket fix without having to commit to 5 days or it being a boom boom t20 affair. It's great for having a day out with friends/family and still has elements of ebb and flow that I like in test cricket. Do the middle overs drag a bit, probably a fair bit, but then some of the best cricket matches I've ever seen have been low scoring ODI's.

T20
I love the buzz of turning up to a T20 here at Taunton, the atmosphere always seems a bit more charged and it's a perfect way to spend a summers evening with friends having a few ciders and having fun.

I think the length and pace of the 3 formats we have work well and it's quite obvious that the shorter formats are having an influence on both each other and test cricket. If you look at any of those formats from 10-15 years ago they have evolved quite a fair bit. T20 certainly isn't an awful format, it's a great way to introduce people to the game and I've got friends that now watch all forms of cricket simply because they found the commitment to a 3 hour T20 much easier to swallow than a whole day or 5 days of cricket - these people are now into test cricket and love that format yet without the short format they probably wouldn't have got into the game at all.

[nivaga]

It's entertaining to watch but I struggle to take pundits seriously when they elevate individual moments of risk taking (or failure) as an indication of the winning teams superior cricketing skills or mastery!

You can go for the highest reward off the highest risk shot one day and it comes off - and another it doesn't.  Last night 2x rank full tosses resulted in both QDK and Miller picking out fielders on the boundary.  7/10 times those bad balls would have gone for 6 from international batsmen.  Yet ENG supporters assign some kind of 'winning skill' to that bad delivery and regulation catches ... and another day SAFA supporters would have assigned some kind of brilliance to regulation hitting bad balls for 6!  Wood bowls one 'bad over' and suddenly he is rubbish after bowling 2 good overs?

In my mind T20 tends towards an athletic version of poker where those who win most often are those who statistically make the best judgement calls juggling probabilities of risk/reward. In longer formats those moments average out quite well and force less risk taking.  In individual matches that can skew things horribly and I suspect that there are plenty of matches where the teams that have made significantly better risk/reward decisions lose. Memories become very short in T20 and reputation are built on individual deliveries or overs rather than statistics.

Its fun, and it has its place as a short format given time constraints - but I struggle to read much more into matches between top teams except about consistency of good decision making and execution of the basics under pressure. Flamboyant risk taking is way too dependent on the cricket god's smiling on individual moments that day (... and sometimes multiple days before that inexplicable 'loss of form') to allow myself to get too carried away about players 'brilliance' based on T20.

*As an aside, when will cricket become baseball where you get 3 chances to try get a maximum, have only 3 wickets/innings and multiple innings per match - because that is where it is fast going?  I think different questions need to be asked about the declines in players/support and I suspect the real answers lie less with a lot of other bumf that goes along with the professional era - like being overly competitive at junior levels that quickly excludes and alienates players at each age group!