Twenty20 cricket was a marketing team's answer to empty county grounds
By 2002 English county cricket was playing to thinning crowds. So four staff from the England and Wales Cricket Board's marketing, sales and sponsorship teams pitched a 20-over game invented by New Zealander Martin Crowe. County chairmen approved it by 11 votes to 7, and within a few years Twenty20 had packed stadiums worldwide.
Each side gets a single innings of at most twenty overs, 120 legal deliveries, so a match lasts a little over three hours, closer to other popular team sports. The aim was fast, exciting cricket for younger fans and television audiences put off by the longer formats. A forerunner called Cricket Max, with two ten-over innings per team, ran in New Zealand from 1996 to 2003; its free hit for a no-ball is the one rule that survived into modern limited-overs cricket.
The first official matches were played between English counties on 13 June 2003, and Surrey beat Warwickshire by nine wickets in the first final. Crowds followed. The first Twenty20 game at Lord's, in July 2004, drew 27,509, the ground's biggest county attendance outside a one-day final since 1953. Australia's first match at the WACA sold out, and at the Gabba in 2007 so many unexpected fans arrived that staff flung open the gates and let many in free. In February 2008, 85,824 people watched Australia play India at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Money arrived fast too. Billionaire Allen Stanford poured at least US$28 million into a West Indies tournament from 2006 and planned winner-takes-all matches worth US$20 million each against England, but only one took place before he was charged with fraud in 2009. After the 2007 World Twenty20, India launched the Indian Premier League in 2008 on the North American franchise model. Star India paid US$2.55 billion for its broadcasting rights covering 2018 to 2022, and per match few sports competitions anywhere earn more.
Similar leagues sprang up from the Caribbean to Pakistan and Bangladesh, along with women's competitions in Australia and England. Fittingly for a format built on fresh audiences, the very first Twenty20 International, in August 2004, was a women's match, England against New Zealand.
Source: Twenty20
