Awright. Let's flip through history while tapping into the present, and I'll tell you a story or two on the way.

Long back, the Devil looked at cricket, then a gentleman's game. Whether it was the skill of Bradman playing dead-straight, or Vishy's someone-took-the-chair-from-under-me posture in the middle of an extra-cover drive, the Devil wasn't pleased. Understandable. He had worked hard to make the world a worse place, and this sport exuberated a class of its own that he needed to dent.

So, as he lusted with his many bitches, he picked the baseball one to undo it all. And she responded, with success.

A quick one-line intro to baseball - its quite similar to cricket except that bowlers are non-players and batsmen slog every single ball as if it were the last of the innings, therefore taking lesser brains, more brawls and a lot more balls to win matches.

The bitch trotted by a lush, green lawn at Lords, the mecca of cricket, to watch a Test match. She hung about for five days, thinking to herself, "sure, this IS a Test, five freaking days in the outfield!", and she finally came to the conclusion that the game HAD to be shortened.

She seduced my lovely little sport, and planted her dirty bite, piece by piece. Slowly, cricket got introduced to new terms - LOIs, ODIs, 60-overs, 50-overs, and so forth. The kits got color. The game started relying on technology to make decisions, and the cover-up was a dumb-ass third-"umpire" who just needed to look into the TV replay, ensure no rules are broken and hit a button. Captains were forced to make batting easier, and keep two catchers, and only two fielders outside the until-now alien "inner circle".

The game also got a totally new dimension - math - and we were suddenly talking of all kinds of rates - the run rates, required rates, over rates, economy rates, strike rates, etc. If this weren't enough, Mr. Duckworth and Lewis walked in on a rainy day and did you-know-what. And the laws, oh Holy Force in the Heavens - chewing gum and spitting on the ball, accidentally, was a serious offence.

Finally, the bitch took my sweet game by the balls (literally) introducing it to the white kookaburra and bringing in the pinch-hitters.

Bowlers were being humiliated.

Hey, these changes opened many doors, and the game got a wider audience, but the authentic class of cricket took the first major nail in. It sunk in deep and remains there till date.

The female-hound isn't satisfied yet. As yellow-pajamas dominated cricket, she struck again, towards the turn of the millennium, with even more vengeance. This time around, the menu had a lot more words to offer.

Super-subs and power plays are the in-thing. While the '90s belonged to the Manhattan graphs, Hawk-eye has made this decade its own, as technology continues to dilute the elegance. Umpires are now forced to make a huuuge aarti-ish circle, every five overs for the first twenty. The word "twenty" brings me to what we know as Twenty20, which is in reality, a bowler's necropolis.

Not that ODIs escaped the wrath. Australia scored 434 and lost - prompting Irfan Pathan and Zaheer Khan to post profiles of Naukri.com. From humiliation to murder.

All that's left now is annihilation.

Don't be fooled, yours truly is a die-hard fan of the contemporary version too, but old-school is old-school.