The thing about T20 cricket - Inbox at Cricinfo

Only three days into the World Twenty20 and one of the Kings of cricket teams thus far is out of the tournament. An associate member of ICC, Ireland easily Pushed Bangladesh out of the second round and England the host team were galloped by the nascent Netherlands in the opening game. Another finalist for the last World Twenty20 is struggling to move to the second stage. So who is your favorite for World Twenty20?

Yes, now you have the luxury to keep Australia out and probably by tomorrow you would also be comfortable to keep a few good teams out. But the question is, coming into this tournament, how many of us believed that Australia would crack like this? How many of us believed that Netherlands would punish a team that is considered to be the father of this format? How many of us thought that Pakistan would be so unsure about its place in the second stage? Do we still dare to have a favorite?

One of my favorite writers, Harsha Bhogle, recently mentioned in his article about the impact of the duration of a game by saying "If football was played over 20 minutes Manchester United and Barcelona may not have been in the final." This is the underlying difference between a T20 and other fatherly forms of cricket. When the game is reduced to shorter duration, the strategies must change and at the same time, it adds an element of surprise into it. It is easier to play at your top level for 3 hours, but not so easy when you have to stretch the same to over a day. At the same time, there is a little room for making mistakes when you are up in the short format, since there is a little room for recovery.

In the longer format of the game, even if you make some mistakes, there is time for you to recover, your team and the captain can plan out counter attacking strategies. But such luxuries are not accepted by T20. Such basic things have allowed us to see surprises more often which in fact are not surprises, because there have been far too many. This probably is the core of T20. And probably this would be the reason for T20 to be a huge success.

It's very simple: the shorter the game, the more games it takes to separate the good teams from the merely average. Think of a single T20 game as a session at a Test match: each given session has a reasonable chance of being won by either side, but by the final day the better team (if there is one) will have emerged over the course of the 15 sessions.
It is a shortsighted criticism to suggest that T20 has no concept of favourites any more than it is true to criticise a single session of a test match: both are pointless without context - the important thing is that any successful T20 competition must have a sufficient number of games for a better team to emerge. Its therefore better to have a handful of longer competitions than a glut of leagues, all so short as to be virtually meaningless.