The longer span gave a greater chance for the subtleties and beauties of the game to play out: bowling line and length, playing a straight bat, building an innings, weaving a web, exploiting a wearing pitch and all the delightful rest of it. Cricket was endlessly complex. It needed time.
Sometimes at school we played evening matches, 20 overs a side. We despised their brevity. If cricket was chess this was noughts and crosses. If cricket was haute cuisine, this was a hamburger.
Roll on half a century, however, and it's hamburgers and noughts and crosses as far as the eye can see. As I type, the World Twenty-Twenty Cup is being played in the UAE, a country that only came into existence when I was in the fourth form.
When professional 20-over cricket began around the turn of the century, the public took to it immediately while the players considered it a joke. But it was a joke that paid well. And as is common with things that pay well, the players learned to like it.
The better they got the more the crowds flocked. The more the crowds flocked the more the money flowed, to the effect that these days it is the dominant form of cricket because it generates the most money. And in defiance of the scoffers and mockers, it is brilliant.
The scoffers and mockers, of whom I was emphatically one, said that this shortened form debased the game, removing its variety and wonder. It reduced batting to slogging and bowling to negativity. Subtle batting and spin bowling would disappear. We were wrong.
By compressing the length of the innings the game has obliged batsmen to innovate in order to score runs faster. As a result more new ways to hit the ball have been discovered in the last 20 years than in the preceding 200.
Last week I watched the Englishman Buttler score a century from about 60 balls. Buttler's an old-style name but, boy, is he a new-style player. He hit shots that made me gasp. He played the ramp, the scoop, the reverse sweep, the switch hit, shots that not only did not exist when I was a child, they had not been imagined.
And it is the same with bowling. Bowlers used to pride themselves on a stock delivery they could repeat all day. That's no use in the new cricket. Predictability is death. So now we have knuckle balls, sliders, wide yorkers, off-pacers, cross seamers, slow bouncers, all deliveries once unheard of. And slow bowlers, spin bowlers, mystery bowlers, of a type that we thought would wither to nothing, have become the most valuable bowlers of all.
You could argue that it's all economics. The shortened game is just the new and improved version of an old product.
You could argue that it's all politics. That, in a free society, competition generates innovation.
You could argue that it's all social. Our lives are busier. We have less time for leisure.
But however you view it, there's no going back. Cricket evolved as a thoughtful pastime but 20 20 has compressed it into frenetic entertainment. It has gone from a Tolstoy novel to a Bond movie. There is room for both in this world.
