Cricket World Cup 2023: Has Glenn Maxwell done enough to save 50-over cricket?
Fifty over cricket is fighting for its life, and desperately needed a jolt. Enter Glenn Maxwell, whose freak innings might have shown what the format needed to survive, writes Robert Craddock.
As the World Cup surges towards a fascinating conclusion, an important question is hanging in the breeze: has Glenn Maxwell saved the format?
The 50-over game is under extreme pressure around the world and the MCC is campaigning to make it a “World Cup only’’ format due to the proliferation of more than 15 frontline T20 leagues around the globe.
This World Cup needed to be more than good. It needed spark and drama and unique storylines to remind us of what we would lose if it was gone.
Maxwell’s absurd 201 not out off 128 balls did that because it was an innings which could only have been played in the 50-over game.
In T20 cricket you would not have had the time to do it and in a Test you would have had too much time to bother going so fast.
It proved that white-ball innings don’t have to disappear from the memory bank in 24 hours.
Rarely has a white-ball innings left such a telling trail of stardust.
Maxwell is now the centre of a Fox Sports special with Mark Howard in which he is takes apart the innings thread by thread.
Adam Gilchrist said on his Club Prairie Fire podcast that Maxwell’s innings might have saved the format because it proved the one-day game “had time for the story to be told, time to consolidate and rebuild in games which look like they are lost, which T20 does not allow.’’
Fifty-over cricket was craving an innings like Maxwell’s.
Among the key criticisms of the format is that it lacks the volcanic stroke play of T20 cricket and the rich, intertwined storylines of the five-day game. Maxwell’s innings had both.
Just because 50-over cricket is hanging by a withering thread outside World Cups does not mean that thread will break.
Cinema was supposed to kill radio and didn’t. Streaming services were supposed to kill cinema and didn’t.
With Australia and South Africa and India and New Zealand to meet in the semi-finals, the tournament is guaranteed the thunderous punchline it needs.
It’s what happens next that will be intriguing.
Between the 2019 and 2023 50-over World Cups, cricket’s big four nations (Australia, India, England and South Africa) cut in half the amount of 50-over games they played.
The format is contracting. For every Maxwell masterclass, there are endless games played by below-strength teams for a trophy no one cares about.
The 50-over game needs people championing its worth such as former England captain Mike Atherton, who said that given the choice of watching one day of cricket he would take a 50-over game before the other two formats.
Cricket must convince many other fans to do the same, otherwise the 50-over game will become a World Cup experience and very little in between.
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