A new mode of cricket designed to be the sport’s “middle-format” and including AI scouting methods is set to be brought to Abu Dhabi in April.
A thousand teenagers are due to attend trials with a view to playing the first season of Test Twenty, a form of the game devised by an Indian businessman. Matches will have two T20 innings per side, played over the course of a day, with the potential for wins, losses, and draws.
It is targeted at 13 to 19-year-olds, with players from all over the world set to be involved. The trials, using hi-tech selection methods at Abu Dhabi Cricket and Sports Hub, will whittle down the aspiring players to a final pool of 300 for auction.
They will then be chosen for the first season, which will involve six teams – three from India, plus one each from London, the United States and the UAE. The squads will include 16 players, eight of which will be from India, with the rest drawn from elsewhere.
The idea of two-innings matches played in one day has been mooted a number of times in the past. This incarnation is the most formal attempt yet at creating a mode of the game which its creator hopes will become established in the future.
Gaurav Bahivani says he decided to push on with his project after discussing it with the likes of Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd and AB de Villiers, and receiving positive feedback. He first came up with the idea after chatting about cricket with friends in the UAE in December 2024.
“It was a typical conversation: Test is losing its sheen, ODI is dying, T20 is chock-a-block, etc,” Bahivani said. “On the way back to the airport I said, what happens if you bring the original form of cricket, which is traditional cricket, and try to make it relevant for the current generation?
“It's the video game generation. [But] there has to be a way where traditional cricket is understood, played and acknowledged by this generation.”
Sat in the lounge at Dubai International Airport, he started sketching out an idea for a game that would marry Test and T20, and one he hopes would appeal to youngsters, like his own son.
Initial trials have already taken place in India, and he says the young players are loving “the middle form” of the game.
Matches take around six-and-a-half hours – so are shorter than a day of Test or ODI cricket, but twice the length of T20.
Player trials ahead of the first season will be more typical of an American style “combine” rather than traditional cricket selection days. It is also set to involve technology that is used to aid scouting in the NFL, which has been modified for cricket for the first time.
“There is so much politics around the world around who gets selected; I wanted to shy away from that,” Bahivani said. “We have a fair and transparent way of being selected: I have objective data, and a subjective viewpoint of a human being. I’ll combine the two and give you a score.”
The video-based AI technology will be used to help assess players. “Simply put, the camera has been taught what to look for in an under-19 cricketer,” using nine different metrics, according to Bahivani.
He says the difference between the human coach and the machine was just three per cent, in trials they had using the “discovery engine” in India. At the combine, each batter will be scored out of 150 – 50 using the AI method, 50 judged by a human coach, and 50 by a motion sensor on the back of the bat.
“If you look at the scouting process around the world, the fate of 100, 200 kids who come for selection is dependent on this one chap,” Bahivani said. “How are you going to humanly scan each one and expect that gentleman sitting there in scorching heat to say ‘Well, my vision of each child is going to be exactly the same'? It's not possible. Depending on his mood on that particular day, the fate of many is written. If you're not selected, you have to come back next year.”
Bahivani said he has had over 10,000 applications from players ahead of the first season, including from as far afield as Mexico and Morocco. Abu Dhabi has been a site for experimentation in cricket frequently in the past. It annually hosts the first T10 league, after it had its two pilot seasons in Sharjah.
Pink-ball Test matches under floodlights are now played, largely thanks to experiments that took place in Abu Dhabi first. And Zayed Cricket Stadium even once hosted a trial for a version of the game divided into five-over splits, which was aimed to revive the ODI format.
