As the men’s Indian Premier League turns 18 years old, Twenty20 cricket is no longer a new kid on the block. But now that the format is entering adulthood, it may be showing symptoms of arrested sporting development.

A fourteen-year-old miracle worker notwithstanding, the impression of this year’s tournament so far has been of the format studiously exploring its own weaknesses. Sixes are aplenty, of course, but their monotonous regularity is all too rarely leavened by suspense about the outcome of the game. Only a small handful of matchups have been genuinely close, with the result in serious question to the end. Otherwise, the margins have often been wide, the die cast early. Wins by 7 wickets and 24 balls, 8 wickets and 22 balls, 5 wickets and 23 balls, by 44 runs, 50 runs, even 80 runs — such finishes can only mean a game petering out into anticlimax (and without the consolation prize of ‘the draw’).

The very thing that forces batters to take extreme risks, the limited number of balls in which to score, also mitigates against them reacting to shifts of power within a game. Wickets fall in a flurry, but the batting team must persist in swinging for the fences, and usually goes down doing so. There simply isn’t space in the format for creative adjustment. The percentages continue to favour this kamikaze behaviour, even if it often results in damp squibs of contests.

Bowlers, meanwhile, always the Cinderellas at this ball, continue with their manic variations, so much so that variations have lost all sense of variety or surprise. Often, a ‘good’ ball in this format, like many a ‘good’ shot, looks ugly: a slower ball long-hop, a wide full-toss.

Of course, you wouldn’t think any of this from the increasingly forced hyperbole of TV commentators. Whatever the evidence of our own eyes, each game is a ‘magnificent spectacle’, each crowd continually ‘on the edge of their seats’, and we will apparently ‘never tire’ of seeing x, y and z play their umpteenth ramp, slog sweep or straightish swipe for six.

The show must go on and the IPL remains one of the great commercial successes in the history of the game. But despite its impressive popularity, the downsides of the format are more and more evident. Given the constant precarity of both bat and ball, the superfluity of sixes and wickets, as well as the stranglehold of data-analysts on tactics and strategy, 20/20 as a sporting contest is not improving with age.

We might also ask, adapting a famous line by the great Trinidadian historian and activist, C.L.R. James, ‘what do they know of 20/20 who only 20/20 know?’ Cricket, James taught us, like other popular sports, is always a distillation of wider cultural forces. Thus, for James, the ‘golden age’ of cricket expressed the imperial self-confidence of late Victorian and Edwardian England, just as the drab, safety-first batting James observed in England in the 1950s reflected what he called a “welfare state of mind”.

From this Jamesian perspective, 20/20 can be seen as the brilliant twenty-first-century love-child of a rapidly globalising Indian economy — ‘Incredible India’ — and a media revolution that beamed games instantly onto TVs and phones all around the world. Hovering uneasily between the cosmopolitanism of the global franchise system and the hyper-nationalism of ‘India Shining’, the IPL is cricket for the age of the AC shopping mall, excitingly new and alluring at first blush, but with a vague and growing sense of sterility and sameness. What happens, 20/20 seems to be asking us now, when the ‘incredible’ reveals itself as predictable and ordinary?

James thought that what propelled cricket forward, what gave it life as a popular artform and, at its best, a kind of representative power, were the outstanding individuals who could break the sporting mould when the surrounding culture required it. For him, W.G. Grace did not just embody the golden age but he also created it. Similarly, the post-War drabness of English cricket was answered by the flare of Frank Worrell’s West Indians, dragging world cricket into a post-colonial future.

Test cricket, though long assumed to be moribund as a format, has continued to renew itself in this way. From Waugh to Ganguly to Stokes, from Ambrose and Walsh to Cummins and Hazlewood, from Murali and Warne to Lyon, from Richards to Sachin to Root, old disciplines have been reimagined and tired tactics rethought. The recent upsurge of ‘Bazball’ involved Test cricket drawing new energy from the most exciting innovations in 20/20 batting techniques; given the constraints of 20/20, it is hard to imagine the sporting influence flowing in the other direction.

Test cricket, and the first-class game that serves as its training ground, gives great cricketers time and space to express themselves as artists. 20/20, for all the extraordinary novelty of its collective skill-sets, increasingly reduces even its greatest exponents to cogs in the machine, forced to do what the shortness of the game routinely demands from everyone at all times.

But Test and first-class cricket may well continue to wither on the vine, squeezed out by the brute commercial force of franchise tournaments. 20/20 cricket may eventually become the default form of the game. Nothing in history requires that the most aesthetically satisfying and dynamic forms of culture will out-compete their less interesting, less complex rivals.

Yet it is more and more clear that Test cricket, even in its reduced state today, continues to offer cricketers an unrivalled sporting stage to represent themselves and the people who admire and love them. Perhaps what it will mean for 20/20 to come of age, therefore, is that the format will grow to recognise its own limitations and give more space to its other family members. Then the profits of short-form cricket will be shared more widely and reinvested more wisely to nourish the fragile global ecosystem of cricket that gave 20/20 life in the first place.

In the renewal of balance between the varied formats of the game, cricketers must take the lead, as they always have in the game’s long and storied evolution. And those dying generations of us who have spread our dreams under their feet will continue to say, with W.B. Yeats, “tread softly because you tread on our dreams.”