Cricket: Twenty20 - it's all about getting another over over

"Quickie/Quickie Cricket" and "Cricket on Crack" - just two of the nicknames for Twenty20 cricket, the short, fast, 21st-century version of the game.

New Zealand play their first Twenty20 international, against Australia, at Eden Park on Thursday.

The Black Caps are marking the occasion by reviving their two-tone beige and brown polyester uniforms of the 1980s.

Their transtasman rivals are dusting off their yellow and green "budgerigar" outfits from the same era.

Twenty20 is the Noughties answer to the one-dayer, which caused a similar ruckus when it began in the early 1970s.

Purists then, as now, complained that it just wasn't cricket. Teams were not supposed to play fewer than 50 overs, and certainly were not meant to wrap up a game in one day.

Well, now they are down to 20 overs. Bowlers stay on for no more than four overs and the game is finito in two or three hours.

That brevity has advantages for cricket lovers and non-lovers alike.

"Blokes can get out of the house, get their fill on a Sunday afternoon and get home again with the relationship still intact," one commentator wrote.

Those enjoying a summer's day at home are less likely to have their peace ruined by blaring radios and televisions.

Stuart Robertson, former marketing manager of the England and Wales Cricket Board, is credited with inventing Twenty20.

His aim was twofold: to get bums back on seats at games and get today's "cash-rich and time-poor" society interested in the sport.

He considered Twenty20 as a means to an end.

"It was your fun-size Mars bar; a little taste of cricket that, hopefully, would get people who merely tolerated cricket - rather than those who considered themselves fans of the game - to upgrade to one-day and maybe four- and five-day cricket," he told the Sydney Morning Herald this month.

Robertson has achieved his first goal at least.

Major Twenty20 games in Britain and Australia have sold out.

Britain has its own Twenty20 Cup, which Kent captain David Fulton called "a shot in the arm for cricket in this country".

Twenty20 has also been a hit on Australian TV, attracting as many as 300,000 more viewers than one-day internationals featuring the national side.

The country's cricket board plans to introduce Twenty20 to domestic competitions next year.

New Zealand Cricket chief executive Martin Snedden has said that is unlikely to happen here for a while yet.

By the time it does, the rest of the cricket-playing world may have moved on to Ten10.