T20 has taken over the entire sport's structure in less than 20 years, and the Olympics are coming up soon.
In a time when information about anything is accessible with just a few clicks, information about the pop ensemble United Colours of Sound is strikingly scarce.
The band appears to consist of ten members in one extremely low-resolution image that can be found online but there are only five members in a shaky YouTube clip that shows them singing England's official 2003 Rugby World Cup song at Twickenham with UB40. However, none of the five is the voice coach for TV talent shows and radio host Carrie Grant, who was undoubtedly a member of the group at one point.
The mystery of how, on May 8, 2003, at a rooftop bar in London, two of United Colours of Sound's countless members found their hands resting on the unlikely shoulders of John Crawley and Chris Adams, while another wielded a cheap bat in front of county cricket royalty, really takes precedence over the answers to such questions, at least for The Spin this week. The picture didn't hold up as well five minutes after the photographer first released the shutter as it does now, 21 years after it was taken to promote the first ECB T20 Cup campaign. Add in some hilariously bad Elvis Presley and Austin Powers "lookalikes" (an epic misnomer).
“I remember cringing when it came out,” stated Adams. “We were used to doing unusual photoshoots for sponsors, but this stood out as a strange one.”
Even if it didn't feel like it at the moment, cricket was going to undergo a permanent transformation in the presence of such unremarkable music. For a while now, the England and Wales Cricket Board's dusty boardrooms had harboured ambitions to update its offerings. The long-running Benson & Hedges Cup needed to be replaced with something more accessible to the general public, and the loss of tobacco sponsorship in British sport provided an opportunity to do so.
In case you were wondering, the 18 first-class counties voted in favour of the new competition by an overwhelming 11 to 7. The counties that were initially opposed to the idea included Gloucester, Middlesex, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Sussex, Warwickshire, and Yorkshire. To convince them of the idea, renowned cricket reporters from the time were flown to the then-ECB chairman Lord MacLaurin's vacation home in Valderrama, Spain. The moniker T20 first came up in a group discussion among the journalists.
When Stuart Robertson, the ECB's marketing manager, invited media to the opulent Kensington Roof Gardens in central London for a launch photoshoot that could have been considered legendary if it hadn't been so ridiculously forgettable in May 2003, the first season of professional T20 action was about to begin.
“My God, I don’t know why we ended up with those entertainers,” laughs Robertson. “We did the best we could on the budget we had. I remember going out shopping to buy a trophy for the Twenty20 Cup and had about £1,500 to spend or maybe not even that much. It was nothing. I went down to the local sports trophy shop and just asked them for the biggest trophy I could get for that amount.”
The senior brass of the ECB removed their ties for the presentation, which was an oddity that the attending reporters did not miss. Truly, a new age had begun.
Since their match on June 13 would be the first-ever professional match played in the format, photographers gave Sussex captain Adams and his Hampshire opponent, Crawley, first dibs. Not that nobody involved thought T20 would go as far as it did.
“It was all a bit of fun,” noted Adams. “Swing hard and if you win a couple of games then great. If not then don’t worry about it because it probably won’t be around in two or three years. I remember having to walk out for a hat-trick ball to Wasim [Akram], which is never something you want to be doing. But the match was a lot of fun.” Adams survived that delivery, but as the new competition took off, Sussex lost by five runs.
Free to advertise their games in any way they pleased, the counties tried a range of strategies to draw in new fans, from setting up hot tubs and bounce houses near the field to attaching a rubber duck to a remote-control car and taking it out into the outfield to cheer on batters who were out without registering a run.
From then on, everything changed very quickly. A biennial T20 globe Cup ensued, with the most recent edition commencing this Sunday week in the West Indies and the United States. The cricketing globe quickly adopted domestic T20 competitions of its own, with the Indian Premier League at the top of the worldwide pyramid. T20 cricket's phenomenal rise will come to an end in four years when it is added to the Olympic Games.