Here's an interesting comparison: in the summer of 1985 England's most powerful batting order of the 1980s, a briefly functional job-lot of Gower-Gatting-Gooch-Lamb, steadily overwhelmed Australia's bowling attack as England won a memorable home Ashes series. In the course of which, and with a total of 773 Australian overs faced over two months, England's top five specialist batsmen managed to hit only one six between them, this despite performing with memorable buccaneering vim over six Test matches.

By way of contrast the recently-concluded ICC World Twenty20 saw a total of 225 sixes hit in close to 900 overs at a rate of just over one six every four overs. Much well-informed analysis has already been devoted to the tournament and in this spirit the Spin would like to offer here its own considered dissection of a competition West Indies won by managing to hit more sixes than anyone else, thereby defeating opponents who were, by and large, unable to hit quite so many sixes. Most notably in Sunday's final the Windies, after starting slowly, adopted the far more successful tactic of hitting lots of sixes towards the end of their innings. In the Spin's analysis this was largely down to Marlon Samuels, who came in and hit a lot of sixes. Sri Lanka, for their part, would later fail in one vital area: not hitting anywhere near as many sixes.

In a similar vein the Spin firmly believes England would have progressed to the knockout stages of the competition if they had hit a lot more sixes, particularly in the games they lost, which were the ones where they didn't hit enough sixes. And branching out into a more holistic analysis it is the Spin's conviction that the reason South Africa once again "choked" in a major ICC competition is that they failed to hit lots and lots of sixes, particularly in those matches they lost due to not scoring enough runs quickly enough because of hitting too few sixes.

This is not intended to denigrate the complexities, technical and narrative, of Twenty20 cricket. It is simply to acknowledge that in a sport that lends itself more than most human occupations to a sense of ages passing – new dawns, old dawns, periods of mawkish, sodden, quavering reflection – we are currently passing through what is best characterised not as the age of Uncertainty or the Age of Revolution, but as the Age of The Six. The six is no longer a variation, an explosion, a tactical oddity, but an end in itself, the basic unit of cricketing success in the sport's noisiest and most lucrative form.

And make no mistake, international Twenty20 cricket is a game of sixes. In Sri Lanka, the team that hit the fewest sixes won only four matches out of the 27 played, the same number as at the 2010 tournament and two fewer than in 2009. West Indies won the final by 36 runs, having hit six more sixes than their opponents. In the semis they won by 74 runs and hit 10 more sixes than Australia. Sixes! What did we do without them? What were we thinking? How did we fill the empty hours?

Either way it will remain the defining image of the modern game: the scything bat, the white ball silhouetted above the floodlights, the bellowed inanity, the plume of flame, the disco dancing, the delirious gurning six-aphiles in the stands. And of course, this being a Twenty20 phenomenon, there is a political element to the rise of the six. To praise Twenty20 cricket is, invariably, to stand accused of fad-ism, philistinism, idiocy, disco-dancing, cowardice, moral emptiness, wearing brown in town and, most importantly, not knowing very much about cricket. To fail to enjoy Twenty20 cricket, on the other hand, is likely to incur charges of stuffed-shirtism, old-hatism, crankishness, wilful myopia, career racism.

Albeit this is perhaps nothing new in English cricket where six hitting has always had slightly troubling associations: a sense of flakiness, of abandon and indulgence, perhaps even a lurking hysteria. This is in part a consequence of the English concept of batsmanship as above all an ascetic scholastic affair, a business of orthodoxies painstakingly acquired. In England the six has traditionally been the preserve of the left-elbow low brigade, the boggle-eyed tail-ender, the insubordinate undergardener. Even Ian Botham's six hitting was portrayed at times as a function of his troubling populism, an early indication of impending captaincy-fail and m@rijuana-shemozzle, that ringlet-tossing stomp towards paunchy self-destruction.

That was then, though. The modern six is something else, a basic unit of batsmanship with its own punkishly modernising associations. The six has a gravity about it now. It is in its various aerial forms the most important shot, the money shot, the shot every talented schoolboy cricketer across the world is currently spending his hours mastering, where once his head might have been bowed in submissive defence. And so the temptation is to devalue the modern six, to cast it as a disposable thing, a junk-six conjured for television out of a favourable tide of regulation-tweak and equipment overhaul. The pocket-sprung nature of the modern bat is often highlighted. There is now no such thing as "the middle". It's all middle. The edge is the middle. On commentary in Sri Lanka, Mark Waugh could be heard talking with a sense of weary resignation about the basic inequity of the modern bat, with its club-like demolition of the old orthodoxies of sweet spot and timing. But then Waugh was part of the Australian team that won all three ODIs against England in 1993 without a single specialist batsman hitting a six, producing most memorably a chasteningly mild and reserved match-winning century at The Oval to eclipse an innings of rare popeyed fury from Robin Smith who hit an astonishing three sixes (three!) in England's total of 267.

Plus of course there is a sense of muscular mediocrity being rewarded, of a narrowing of cricket's own baroque and refined range of skills into this single point of fascination. The career of Kieron Pollard is traditionally hoist in evidence at this point: a man who by old school measures has only half a game, an aerial smiter of the lower order, embarrassingly guileless against Dominic Cork's bouncer in a Lord's final, but still enthroned as a genuine itinerant Twenty20 superstar and a role model for one-track utility biffers everywhere.

So much for sniffiness. The most compelling objection to six-ification is perhaps a more general one. Is there actually any real entertainment here? What pleasure is there, really, in witnessing a six? Out of context, removed from the attritional struggle of the larger, longer cause, is watching a ball fly repeatedly through air and across the boundary rope actually very interesting?

Probably it all depends. For all the familiar televisual fetishising of the six, in the right hands there is still a basic purity to what is increasingly a feat of athleticism as much as batsmanship. For every jobbing top-order biff merchant we still get Chris Gayle's slow-motion yawn over long-on, the balletic violence of Suresh Raina, the brutal despatch of the Shane Watson swivel pull, even the absurdly languid Umar Gul flip-six, the ball despatched with all the urbane, short-armed dexterity of a man flipping up his umbrella in a thunderstorm.

And really there is no value judgment to be made here. It is simply a change of tempo and texture. For all the projected horrors – notably the idea that the IPL might introduce an "eight" for those swirling flame-throwing, groin-thrusting "maximums" too precious to be merely a six – the biffing homogeneity of the Age of Six has yet to appear. Instead cricket seems more varied and diverse than ever before, an international sport that can make superstars of both Pollard and Alastair Cook, who has 11 sixes in 206 international innings, not to mention Jonathan Trott, last year's ICC cricketer of the year, who has yet to hit a six in Tests. Meanwhile, the six stands right now not so much as an emblem of excess and inanity, as a sign in the road, a dividing of the ways, continuing to exert its gravity as old and new divide and converge. Wallop indeed.

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