It’s not cricket has long been a concept that we all understand. The implication that the most profound of all the team games is also the purest has, alas, been a myth from the days of W. G. But there are many now who believe that the high-profile tournament that reaches its climax this weekend isn’t cricket, either. I don’t entirely agree. It is cricket, just different cricket. And vive la différence, so long as it is not overdone.

There, of course, is the rub. A chafing, blistering rub if we are not careful. This World Twenty20 has shimmered in the long June evenings and the barely required floodlights, not only because some of the power, precision and inventiveness of the batting has thrilled, nor because the bowlers have found new ways to try to circumvent them, nor even because the fielding has been more athletic than ever, but also because the whole tournament has been so blissfully short-lived.

County cricket’s Twenty20 Cup, postponed while the international tournament has been played out at an average rate of almost two games a day in a little more than a fortnight, resumes next week. Next year it is proposed to hold an additional county Twenty20 competition. Unless something else gives (less Fifty50?), that is greedy, foolish and bound to reduce the size of the crowds overall. When is the next World Twenty20? Next year. That, too, is foolish, greedy, etc. Nor does it stop there.

The first “champions” trophy for the finalists of the various domestic competitions around the world is due to get off the ground in India from October 8 to 23. That, too, is intended to be an annual jamboree. Meanwhile, the Indian Premier League (IPL) continues, in effect, to hold the ICC to ransom, commercially brilliant in concept but bound to overreach itself in time unless its organisers appreciate their responsibility to the wider game.

The ICC is trying, but, burdened by too many conflicting interests and long-term commercial agreements, it is as slow-moving and impotent as a pensioner in slippers. Haroon Lorgat, chief executive of the ICC, has to get Lalit Modi, the IPL chairman, onside and limit strictly the amount of Twenty20 cricket in a balanced international programme.

Domestic competitions everywhere must then fit round it. In the 1960s, it was 60-overs cricket that was to be the saviour of the game. By the end of that decade, it was the 40-overs variation. It provided healthy, hearty family entertainment, perfect for television, all over on a single Sunday afternoon. Brilliant! Better than the slow-burning games of three days or more for the many (never to be sniffed at, but never also to be the sole arbiters) who have not played and truly understood the sport. But the two-innings game has never needed saving. It merely needs refreshment at regular intervals, which is what is happening now.

It has been an interesting and successful World Twenty20. I have not felt the desire to travel to watch live matches, but I have kept a keen eye on the television, especially when England were involved. This week, too, however, I have enjoyed a tough, classically fluctuating LV County Championship match at Hove with some 2,000 others each day and ten international players on show. And I can hardly wait for the Ashes.

Like all cricket, Twenty20 is a very good game some of the time. It is high-octane, high-intensity — ideal for the young, for whom concentration is a discipline to be learnt; for the new rich of India; and for London yuppies of the sort who support either Chelsea or Arsenal and can travel short distances by public transport from their still expensive homes in Wandsworth or Notting Hill. It is not so good for those who, like the many MCC members berated by my friend Tim de Lisle in Thunderer this week for exercising their perfect right to choose the sort of cricket they want to watch, would rather keep half an eye on a televised match than travel for hours for a game that might, to all intents and purposes, be decided by the course of the first few overs.

Certainly there are subtleties and strategems in the instant version of the game, as there are in the longer forms, but there is less likelihood of a recovery for a team who lose three wickets in the first three overs. What is more, for all the emphasis on skilful placing of the ball into gaps (nothing new in that), Twenty20 is, in the end, a slogfest. Why, otherwise, would three of the four semi-finalists lead in the boundaries table, or England be deemed to have failed in an otherwise worthy quest because Graham Napier’s muscular ability was curiously spurned and an insufficient number of balls were heaved over mid-wicket or hit inside-out through extra cover.

Nor are the subtler arts anything new. Wilfred Rhodes knew all about the slower ball, Ranji invented the leg glance, Tony Greig (perhaps) the uppercut and a Western Australian named Ryan Campbell the flick over the wicketkeeper’s head. We are witnessing evolution, not revolution.

One last point. Twenty20 would be the ideal shop window for cricket at an Olympic Games, but we already have a World Cup. Overindulgence and overexposure are the banes of all contemporary professional sport. That is why there should be no football now that the Olympics involves professionals, no cricket, no rugby, no tennis and, with respect to our correspondent, no golf, either. Their own great events need no superfluous gilding. Let’s be content with the Open, Wimbledon, the Lions, the Ashes and now, for a fortnight every two years, the World Twenty20.