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Twenty20 cricket "is sport's dot.com bubble"? So, what's the "mobile broadband of baseball"?

"Will this game never end?" asked an American friend, as a cricket match entered its fourth day in London. "Something like this is never going to catch on, you know, in the world at large. Too tedious!"

Americans probably doubt this, but there's probably about the same amount of money in the mysterious game of cricket as there is in baseball. The reason is India (and Pakistan) where cricket occupies 90% of the minds of the population which isn't making money. Much the same as baseball in the US and Canada in the summer.

Today's Guardian newspaper offered us the mysterious quote:

"Economic metaphors have been coming thick and fast this past week or so in relation to sport, so here is another thought: the rise and rise of Twenty20 is cricket's dot.com."

It's a metaphor which probably needs a little explanation for readers on the West side of the Atlantic.

Briefly, cricket is a game very like baseball. The aims are exactly the same, but the solutions are subtly different.

In both games, the object is to see who can hit a small object with a stick hardest. The easiest way to play it is on your own, on a pebble beach, with a stout stick. Toss the stones into the air, swipe at them as they come down, and see how far away they splash. Not much fun, and pretty solitary; so you soon hit upon the idea of getting your friends to toss the stones for you. And that's where all the rules begin, because nobody wants to be the stone-tosser all day, watching you have fun hitting the things to the horizon.

Both games have the same solution to "who hit it hardest?" - you measure it by running a measured strip. The harder you hit it, the further it goes, and the more time you have to run. Subtle difference: cricket counts the number of times you run to the other end of the field; baseball counts how many times you can run right around the field. But each game counts "runs" as a measure of hard hitting. Baseball's solution is simple: you get three fair hits, and if you miss them all, it's someone else's turn.

They all want a turn. So you come up with rules which say: "OK, my turn now."

Again, the basic penalty is that if you hit the ball into the air and someone catches it, your turn is finished. Cricket adds the target; the ball-tosser has to try to hit it, and the batter has to prevent them by hitting the ball. Baseball takes the easy option: you get three fair hits, and then your turn is over; if you haven't scored, tough. And this is where the dot-com allusion comes in, because what the baseball rule does give you, is "an end in sight."

Given really good players, there's no reason at all for a game of cricket to be over in an afternoon. A good batsman can still be out there in the middle of the field three days after his game starts, while everybody else either sits in the pavilion, bored solid, or stands in the field, fed up and exhausted. And when he eventually does finish (caught, or otherwise eliminated by the dozen or so rules designed to get rid of him) there's another dozen or so players who still have to take their turn.

Cricket's answer to the conundrum was to limit the number of ball tosses. But instead of counting the number of balls bowled at the batter, it counts the number in total. And the phrase "twenty20" means that each side gets to throw down 20 "overs" each of six balls (120 total) and then it's time for the other side.

This gives cricket, at the highest level, some of the excitement of baseball. The audience gets to watch the whole game, not just one day out of five; there are breaks where TV adverts can be squeezed in, and enthusiasm can be shared with people who know almost nothing about the subtleties of the game, thus bringing new devotees into the sport.

In reality, the unlimited expansion dreams of any venture are always excessive; the backers want too much, too soon. None of the dreams of the dot-com bubble were silly; it was just silly to expect the existing world of commerce to switch overnight, or die. But by now, most of what the dotcomers were saying, is becoming real.

Perhaps, one day, the dream of the Indial Premier League of cricket (to have the whole world competing to win their trophy) will be true. But then again, the dreams of the American baseball leagues for World domination have been sadly disappointed for many decades.

As with mobile broadband, the problem isn't that there's no demand for it. The problem is that while people would quite like to have it, they really don't want to pay the sort of ticket prices it takes to support all those superstars and the stadia they play in.

Big sports arenas are like mobile base stations. If you have one, it's a great way of charging people money to get in and out. If you haven't, you've got to be very certain of getting a lot of customers through the turnstiles every year to justify the capital expenditure. The question is simple: Will they pay every time they come in? or will they expect a season ticket? And if you go for the season ticket, what happens when they want to come to a match every day?