Cricket: The Ticket to Fast4?

As has been mentioned before, I am an engineer. Engineers are sometimes observed to be somewhat lacking in the area of interpersonal skills. My theory (and a good engineer will almost always have a theory) is that that the stereotypical lack of social graces has to do with how engineers view and interact with the world.

To an engineer, life consists of series of problems that are begging to be solved. For example, if you tell an engineer about a problem you are experiencing, you are more likely to receive a recommendation on a solution or an attempted “fix” rather than a sympathetic ear. My engineer brain naturally examines everything within the context of the problem-solution paradigm.

I regard innovations in the tennis scoring system as attempts to address some particular problem as perceived by the originator of the idea. For example, it is logically clear, and also well documented in journalistic sources, that Jimmy Van Alen’s tie-break game and subsequent adoption of the format by the US Open was to make the length of matches more predictable. This was needed for the purpose of event planning and television. In other words, the problem that the tie-break game was invented to solve was that tennis matches could go on for an indefinite length of time, which is not good for television.

This very naturally brings me to the topic of cricket, which I will be quick to point out is a sport that I know absolutely nothing about. I would observe that there is Calm app Sleep Story on the rules of Cricket similar to the John McEnroe “But Seriously, the Rules of Tennis” story that was a large part of the inspiration for this project. The cricket sleep story is definitely effective for the stated purpose of inducing sleep, but it has failed to transfer any knowledge about the rules of cricket into my brain.

I do know that a cricket match played per the traditional rules runs somewhere between three to five days. Putting pencil to paper, I calculate that this is approximately three to five days longer than my maximum attention span. I would also observe that the three day minimum run time for cricket is actually longer than the 2010 Isner-Mahut marathon match at Wimbledon.

In 2001, a man named Stuart Robertson was the marketing manager of the England and Wales Cricket Board. Crowds at cricket matches were in decline and it was his job to do something about it. To understand the situation, he commissioned a massive consumer research study to determine who was actually attending cricket matches, and more importantly who was not coming and why.

In other words, Robertson was confronted with a problem and he stopped and took the time to make sure he fully understood it before developing and proposing a solution. My engineer brain respects the disciplined approach. The conclusion of the commissioned study determined that cricket matches were way too long to capture and maintain spectator interest. While this seems obvious in retrospect, the detailed analysis of the problem enabled the understanding required to develop a solution that actually addressed the root cause of the issue.

The result of this for cricket was the development and deployment of a version of the rules known as Twenty20, which reduces the run time of cricket games to approximately 3 hours, which is similar to other popular televised sports. This truncated version of cricket revolutionized the game, gained new audiences, and is credited with reviving cricket in the 21st century.

In my investigation of Fast4, I frequently encounter the assertion that Fast4 is the tennis version of Twenty20. The similarity in naming convention as well as the evidence that the format was invented in a country where cricket is a wildly popular sport lends credence to that theory.

The way I imagine that Fast4 came about was that someone in or around Tennis Australia observed the surging popularity of cricket as played under the Twenty20 system and wanted to replicate the same effect for tennis. The thesis would be that because a shortened format lead to a surge in popularity for cricket that the same effect could be induced for tennis. The problem with that approach is that it would only work if the decline in the popularity of tennis was due to the same problem of match length that was the issue with cricket.

Ever since I encountered the Fast4 format I have been trying to understand the root problem that the proponents of the system are trying to solve. Clearly the intent is to shorten matches, but what seems to be missing to me is the tennis specific consumer research that would point to the fact that match length is even a problem at all. Randomly applying a solution that worked for another sport isn’t a good strategy.

I do not like the Fast4 format. Certainly a part of my resistance to the format is because I am attached to the traditional rules of tennis that have been in effect during my lifetime. A larger part of my opposition is based on the appearance that Fast4 was created to solve a problem that tennis does not actually have. It offends my engineering sensibilities.

1. “Meet the man who invented Twenty20 cricket – the man missing out on millions, ” The Daily Mail (UK), June 11, 2008, viewed February 21, 2020.
2. Twenty20 Cricket, Encyclopedia Britannica, viewed February 21, 2020.