Twenty20 cricket in 2020

Grand Finals Day of the Indian Premier League. The glow of the floodlights streams out over the Arabian Sea as Mumbai's spanking new stadium reaches boiling point. A young Pakistani fast bowler, dressed in the garish yellow-and-orange strip of the Cape Town Cheetahs, is running in like a big cat chasing a gazelle. The hometown champion, wearing the royal blue of the Mumbai Indians, lifts his bat in anticipation.

As the bowler reaches his delivery stride, there is a blur of movement as the batsman switches his feet and spins around 180 degrees. The ball is released — and clattered left-handed high into the turquoise vault of the sky.

As fireworks explode over the city, Tony Greig roars, "Aww, he's smashed that one like a kicking horse. These switch-hitters are really turning it on this year."

In the neighbouring commentary box, the man from CNN turns to his neighbour and exclaims: "Hot dog! And that's gonna be a home run — I mean, sorry, a sixer!"

It has been another dramatic year for 20-over cricket — and we still have six months to go. Yuvraj Singh's world record of 115 sixes in a season is already coming under pressure from Jurgen Schwarzmann, a 6ft 9in prodigy who was fortuitously discovered as he felled trees in the Black Forest.

Known as 'The Jurgenator', Schwarzmann has swiftly become the hottest property in the game. The only man who seems capable of keeping him in check is Shane Wijewardene — a gobby leg-spinner born to an Australian father and a Sri Lankan mother — who in May became the first player to bowl a maiden since 2015.

This has been an exciting season for marketing men, too. We have seen the launch of the first team selected according to the results of a television talent show, the West Bengal Wannabes. Since the WBWs have so far failed to win a game, the public may soon be invited to start voting off the players they originally chose.

Meanwhile, the new substitution rules have encouraged some of the franchises' celebrity owners to make brief appearances on the field. We hope that the cosmetic surgery on Shahrukh Khan's broken nose will not hold up his filming schedule for too long, and remind any disappointed fans that a 60-foot holograph of Khan is still being projected above his team's home stadium in Kolkata.

Indian sports lovers can look forward to yet more stimulation when the New Delhi Olympics begin in November. This will be the first Olympiad to be staged on the sub-continent, and also the first to feature cricket since the Paris Games of 1900.

Back then, the only nations to send a team were England and France, but this year's competition will be wide open. Look out for tightly-drilled outfits from China and the United States. With Twenty20 cricket, the English have reverted to a familiar pattern: they invent a sport, then sit back and watch the rest of the world take it to the next level. Perhaps some of their diffidence can be explained by the lingering survival of the Test-match game, which still retains a hard core of support.

Virtually ignored beyond its dwindling outposts in England and Australia, this Victorian throwback takes three whole days to play, and uses a ball made from red cow-hide. Historic techniques such as the forward defensive can be observed, and the scoring rate rarely rises over 10 runs an over. Curiously, the retro styling of Test cricket have been adopted by a sub-culture of young British dissidents, who claim that whites are the new black. They say they have had enough of mainstream sporting events, with their laser light shows and Hawk-Eye headsets, and want to get back to simpler pleasures.

"My dad told me he used to enjoy lying quietly on a grassy field in the sun, and listening to the sound of leather on willow," one spotty youth remarked last week. "Nowadays, it's more like Kevlar on tungsten."