KEY POINTS:
A fourth stump? No leg byes? A first ball free hit? Players in shorts?
Traditionalists who struggle with the basic concept of Twenty20 will need to take a couple of Disprin and lie down in a dark room if the latest ideas to spruce up the newest international
version of cricket are approved.
An Australian Cricketers Association survey of 145 players on the future of the three-hour charge, aka Twenty20, has produced a variety of suggestions, ranging from those worth a good think to candidates for the loony tunes bin.
The fourth stump - strongly supported by bowlers, less so by those in defence - was the most radical.
Two other ideas surely mooted by bowlers were to give them one extra over among the 20 - at present they are restricted to four each - and doing away with leg byes.
But no prizes for guessing who fancied a free hit first ball for batsmen.
Several years ago, Auckland's players wore shorts in the domestic one-day competition revealing an assortment of pins, from the finely honed to the knobbly-kneed.
Forty-one per cent of the Cricket Australia-contracted players expressed support for wearing shorts during Twenty20 games; and only 6 per cent believed playing live music and bellowing disc jockeys during the game would affect their performance.
The international players had no issue with on-field microphones, as worn by Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Symonds and Daniel Vettori during the Twenty20 game in Perth last week, 94 per cent giving them a thumbs-up, while 88 per cent were fine with batsmen being interviewed immediately after being dismissed.
Other ideas included umpires having hand-held television screens to enable quicker run out decisions.
Australian Cricketers Association chief executive Paul Marsh acknowledged that while many players are traditionalists in their views on the game "they are moving down a path of wanting to bring more people into the game".
"What's really important is that whatever innovations are brought in, they don't affect the integrity of the game on the field," he said, which will have the purists chortling.
And one point about the survey of 145 players that the diehards will like; there was an overwhelming view that test cricket is sacrosanct. Just over 50 per cent urged the game's bosses not to cave into public demand for more Twenty20 - and Twenty20 is the third most popular game.
"We don't want to get to a point where Twenty20 takes over from other forms of the game because we think it's going to have a detrimental effect from a skills perspective," Marsh added.
"If you start playing too much Twenty20 and attendance and interest drops off in the other forms, you may never recover them," he added
