Twenty years ago, Martin Crowe tried to start a cricket revolution.

On February 5, 1996, thousands flocked to Cornwall Park in Auckland to witness the first game of Cricket Max, the short-form version of cricket invented by Martin with some help from his brother Jeff.

It featured a number of innovations, but two were more important than the rest.

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Teams had two innings of 10 overs each, and shots played into a Max Zone behind the bowler counted double, turning fours into eights and sixes into 12s.

READ MORE:

* Max: An oral history

* Max: The tournaments

* Max: The internationals

* Max: The rules

* Max: 10 innovations



The first game also included sets of four stumps, eight-ball overs, a ban on LBWs, and specialised roles determining who could bat and who could bowl, all of which would disappear as the game became a fixture of the New Zealand domestic calendar for six years at the turn of the century.

From the November 1996 to November 2002, seven Cricket Max competitions of various formats and lengths were held.

At its peak, Max ran from November to February, and consisted of 31 games - more than the Ford Trophy has today. In its last edition, it consisted of six games over a single weekend

Today, there are four players still active who played a game of Max - Peter Fulton, Rob Nicol, Brent Arnel and Brendon McCullum.

A wide range of descriptions were used by the media in covering it.

It was "exciting," "a good product," and "a TV game".

It was "something for Sky to use to fill in the Friday night slots vacated by rugby and league," "cricket's equivalent of rugby sevens," a strange hybrid that was unlikely to catch on," "little more than a haphazard slog," and, wrote the editor of Wisden, "a dangerous intruder".

But it was also "not just the hit-and-miss cricket that you think it might be," "a vision for the future," "a big adrenalin rush," and "a development tool for introducing the game around the world".

Having found a footing in New Zealand, Crowe tried to take the game global.

The Max Blacks played the England Lions in a three-game series in 1997, and Crowe made approaches to other nations looking for support.

It was combined with an Australian short-form game, Super Eights, and an international tournament was held in Kuala Lumpur. Super Max Eights was endorsed by the International Cricket Council in June 1999, as the "official third-generation game," but that didn't lead to any great upheaval - in England in particular, the Max Zone concept meant it never got off the ground.

The New Zealand Cricket Players Association strike in late 2002 led to the cancellation of that season's Max competition, and after one last international hurrah, against India, the format faded into history.

Max wasn't the first attempt at short-form cricket, and it wouldn't be the last.

The following year, Twenty20 cricket debuted in England, where, backed by a massive marketing blitz, it attracted unprecedented crowds.

Two years after that, the first Twenty20 international was held; two years after that, the first Twenty20 World Cup; and a year after that, the Indian Premier League began.

Nearly eight years on from the first IPL, Twenty20 is still yet to fully find its feet.

For every competition as successful as Australia's Big Bash League, there's one flailing like New Zealand's Georgie Pie Super Smash, and outside of World Cup events, the next of which is in India next month, it is largely forgettable as an international format.

One thing's for sure though, and that's that it's here to stay, carrying on in spirit, if not in form, the revolution Crowe tried to launch two decades ago.

The original Cricket Max rules - click to enlarge.

