T20’s gets two new thinkers: Steve Waugh, hockey GOAT Jamie Dwyer

Waugh, at 60, has taken a full-committed plunge in the sport’s youngest format. Giving him company is Dwyer, who played cricket as a child before taking the path that made him a hockey GOAT. This meeting of cricket’s time-tested wisdom and an outsider’s perspective promises the birth of fresh ideas and also lends to the format the gravitas it so longs for.

In his playing days, India, for Waugh, was the “final frontier”. Now as a T20 owner, the Aussie says, Europe was the “last frontier” to cricket’s journey to go global. With cricket now an Olympic sport and Europe always eager to swell its medals tally at Summer Games, ETPL is an idea whose time has come. For Waugh, this was also a “chance to leave a legacy for cricket”.

In Dwyer, he has help. Cricket and hockey, in Australia, share a close bond. The most-committed intermediary of this association is the hockey great Ric Charlesworth. A first-class cricketer and a well-decorated hockey player and coach, Charlesworth’s voice carries weight. The Kookaburras dominated world hockey when he was the coach and Dwyer as captain.

Charlesworth once told this paper that cricket hasn’t moved with time. He could never understand why batsmen fussed over their position. Like in hockey, he wanted cricketers to be multi-skilled and be more rigid about their roles.

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Dwyer too has heard that from his coach. “He always spoke about cricket and how they don’t challenge themselves more with being more versatile and learning new skills. Like the reverse sweep, obviously it’s come into T20 cricket. We’ve been doing that in hockey for a very long time,” he says.

“Hockey has to be very versatile. You have to be able to attack, defend, play on the left, play on the right. And Ric was a big advocate for that … this is what makes it more fluid, more entertaining to watch. I agree in T20 you should be able to play in the opening batsman or three or four or be a closer and smash some runs at the end. So I think you should be able to adapt your game and be able to be versatile.”

But aren’t T20 leagues diluting cricket, spoiling the technique of young batsmen and killing Tests? And does the world really need another league? Waugh offers a counter by giving the example of English batsman Jacob Bethell, a 22-year-old T20 generation cricketer, who scored 154 in the final Ashes Test. “He’s a young kid who’s been brought up with T20 cricket.

I think it’s just a mindset. You can change from being a T20 cricketer one day to playing in amazing Test innings the next week … I think right now it’s a bit of an excuse for players and commentators to blame T20 on everything,” says Waugh.

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Retired Kiwi pacer Kyle Mills, owner of Edinburgh, does concede that “there is a congestion of cricket” but it is not the case for the ETPL teams. “We look at the Scottish, Irish and the Dutch players, they kind of don’t have as much cricket. They don’t get that opportunity. So this is where the ETPL is just perfect,” he says.

League’s co-founder Abhishek Bachchan, a movie star heavily invested in sports, sums up the hope and aspirations of the players and owners. “What inspires me about sport is to make a difference. My primary job is to be an actor … we tell stories and sell dreams. Being involved in sports, you don’t get to sell dreams. You get to see dreams come true.”

In a format built on reinvention, the ETPL is betting that Europe—and a blend of cricketing wisdom and cross-sport imagination—can offer the game something new.