I feel sorry for cricket coaches. Think of it. Most grew up with age-old conventions that required young batsmen to keep the front elbow high, keep the ball on the ground as much as possible and “play in the V”.

Even with the pressures that came with 50-50 cricket those long-held conventions stayed mostly true — though there could be no denying the advantage of innovative stroke play and power hitting.

Now along comes the Twenty/20 dash with the real money.

To win, all your batsmen must be able to ‘nurdle’ and dab, reverse sweep, scoop, switch hit, launch many sixes and run nonstop. Notice that for the purposes of television, the Twenty/20 authorities are now measuring the sixes.

The next logical step it seems to me is for extra runs to be added for the really big hits. So we may soon start getting eights and 10s and who knows, maybe even 12s.

In the field, the intrepid slide, made popular in 50-50 is now old hat. The fielder must now be able to dive head first to save one run even at the risk of grievous injury — or else he is not trying hard enough.

That business of the bowler showing consistency by hitting the metaphoric six-pence every time doesn’t hold in Twenty/20 cricket. Oh no! If he does that he becomes too predictable and after a ball or two he will be launched for sixes.

So now, no two or three deliveries can be the same and we have slower ball bouncers, slower-slower ball bouncers and knuckle-ball full tosses.

And we get to the woeful sight of Dale Steyn — as classy a fast bowler as there is in modern cricket — aiming to bowl as far as possible from the right hander’s off stump without bowling a wide.

Even to a die-hard West Indies partisan like me it came as a relief after a series of off-stump wides, to see Kieron Pollard’s stumps smashed with the perfect leg-stump yorker. One up for old-fashioned cricket!

An intriguing feature of the Twenty/20 championship was the struggle to fit by highly-respected touch players of the traditional game. Clearly there is a place for those with the ability to find the gaps, manipulate the field and run hard, even if they are not into six hitting. But not all will make it. Unless he can get fit enough to consistently turn the dots into ones and the ones into twos, Ramnaresh Sarwan should forget about Twenty/20

cricket. And Shivnarine Chanderpaul, despite all those reverse sweeps, etc, is simply too long in the tooth for all that hard running. Michael Clarke, the Australian Twenty/20 captain, is another who is clearly very uncomfortable with bang, bang, dash cricket.

So what do we make of new champions England who had never before won a world limited-overs tournament despite the surfeit of such cricket in that country.

Simply put, they were able to change their fortunes thanks to the assured power hitting of their three-man battery of South Africans — Michael Lumb, Craig Kieswetter, Kevin Pietersen — and the Irishman Eoin Morgan.

England trained hard and specifically for this tournament including, it would appear, a dedicated regime of six-hitting during practice. Also, England won because of disciplined bowling led by one of the top off-spin technicians, Graeme Swann.

Fitness was key. We expect that quality all the time from the Australians, but to see it demonstrated with such stunning consistency from the English in the field and in running between wickets was a revelation.

For me there’s no point in cussing out the West Indies. Given the qualities shown by the opposition they were clearly not ready. It seems to me that for Twenty/20 cricket, the West Indies have to think horses for courses. And having chosen the horses, must work assiduously to get them ready in mind and body. It can’t be done without proper domestic competition — not just at the regional level as Stanford provided for that brief through telling period, but perhaps even more importantly, at the club level.

For starters though, the selectors need to think specialists. I would immediately recommend four Trinidadians — William Perkins, the highly innovative opener/wicketkeeper; Samuel Badree, the top-spinning wrist spinner; Dave Mohammed, the accurate left-arm, back-of-the-hand exponent, and Lendl Simmons, with whom the selectors seem to have some problem other than cricket.

For me, Simmons is particularly gifted. The other three may never be any great shakes at the longer versions of the game but they have shown for T&T that at Twenty/20 they are a precise fit.

A last word for the poor coaches: Don’t give up. You can’t stop emphasising the old fundamentals such as the high front elbow and playing straight. Believe it or not, they still have value. It’s just that now your charges must also learn how to ‘nurdle’, dab, reverse sweep, scoop, switch hit, blast a six every over and… who knows what else? Good luck.