Richard Boock: Cricket fans should be afraid, very afraid

Despite what the coaching profession will tell you, cricket has always been a complicated game for the uninitiated, in much the same way that Sudoku will always be a headache for the quizzically challenged.

Robin Williams once described the game as being like "baseball on Valium", Oscar Wilde complained of the indecent positions one was required to assume, and Tommy Docherty reckoned it was the only sport in the world in which you could actually gain weight while playing.

It was even used as a bizarre form of torture during Zimbabwe's war of independence, when the English piped commentaries into the cell of freedom fighter Robert Mugabe in an effort to break his fiercely anti-colonial spirit.

For every supporter who swears by the game, there are about 1000 others who would gladly gouge out their eyes and fill their ears with Bostik just to avoid the slightest brush with its jargon, tradition or torpor-inducing slowness.

As British comedian Frank Muir once said, these people are to cricket what (the late English actress) Dame Sybil Thorndike is to non-ferrous welding. And now it's time to concede that they've won.

Yes, that's right. It might be 129 years since that first test match between Australia and England, but the clamour for "progress" has grown markedly over the past decade, and the writing now seems to be on the wall.

You can see it with the ICC's constant pandering to the masses and pursuit of the cheap spectator dollar.

You can see it in the way they've promoted the third-generation format Twenty20, in the misguided belief it would create a more action-packed event.

That theory, at least, was blown out of the water on Monday night, when Australia romped to a massive 95-run win over South Africa in Brisbane, in one of most boring and uninspiring slogathons on record.

In front of a record crowd of 38,894 at the Gabba, the most for any sporting event at the ground, Australia crushed the South Africans so convincingly that the result was a foregone conclusion midway through the evening, despite all the hype and bluster.

But that setback is unlikely to deter the lemmings at ICC headquarters who appear hellbent on tinkering with the rules and format of the game in the most unsophisticated ways, apparently because they believe it has started to become boring.

The most ugly intrusions have been the supersub and powerplay provisions in the 50-over format, both of which seemed ill-considered and prematurely introduced, not to mention fundamentally flawed.

It would be nice to presume that our ICC overlords have already seen the folly in these "initiatives" and will quickly discard them when the experimentation period ends in June, but we probably shouldn't expect too much.

Any committee flaky enough to approve them in the first place seems unlikely to allow themselves such a dramatic turnaround 10 months later (although, if we apply the same reasoning, maybe they will).

But probably the most galling aspect for true cricket lovers is that the unnecessary interference and experimentation are happening at a time when interest in test cricket has seldom been higher, as we saw in the recent series in England and Australia.

If it's excitement, tension, packed stands and saturation media coverage that they want, they should absorb some of the lessons taught over the past few months and start promoting the "real" game with more zeal.

A schedule offering fewer mismatches and more heavyweight contests would be a good start, as would the extra incentive of a sizeable winner's purse for each series, in order to increase interest in the result.

The way things are going, however, one would not want to hold one's breath.

The next improvisations will probably involve sin-bins, yellow and red cards, extra time and something called "golden wicket".

We should all be afraid. Very afraid.