Tony Becca, Contributor

SOME YEARS ago, while I was president, Melbourne Cricket Club put on a match under lights at the club. It was held on a Friday night, it was a fund-raiser and it was a tremendous success. In fact, it was so successful that we never did it again, we were encouraged to do it again.

After that match, 'Cricket under the Stars' as it was called, we thought of something that has been become quite popular around the world in the past few years.

In an effort to make some much- needed money for the club and to increase the popularity of cricket, we talked about staging a competition among the clubs and probably business houses.

The idea was that the matches would all be played at the club on Wednesday and Friday nights and that they would last for 40 overs - for 20 overs per side.

Try as we did, however, we could not get the sponsorship to provide the lighting - which needed to have been better than that used for the one-off fund-raiser played among over 40 players, and it never got off the ground.

Became popular

A few years ago, in an effort to spread the gospel of the game, the ECB, the England and Wales Cricket Board, introduced Twenty/20 cricket among its counties and in a short time, in a few years, Twenty/20 cricket has become so popular that it not only pulls in capacity crowds wherever it is played, but a Twenty/20 World Cup is also on the way.

Will Twenty/20 ever take the place of Test cricket or the 50-over version of the game? No one knows. One thing is obvious, however, Twenty/20 is fun and because it is so much fun, it is considered one of the best ways to introduce people to the game and to plant the seed for future Test players. And one school which plans to use it for that purpose is Wolmer's Boys' School.

Winners of the former Sunlight Cup, now Grace Shield, on 28 occasions in 101 years, Wolmer's - from which came players like R. K. Nunes, Ivan Barrow, Allan Rae, Reggie Scarlett and Jackie Hendriks to Maurice Foster, Patrick Patterson, Gareth Breese, Carlton Baugh Jr. and Donovan Pagon, and many West Indies representatives, including two captains and six wicketkeepers - is now, when it comes to the finishing line, numbered among the also rans.

When I was a boy at Wolmer's, almost every boy played cricket and the school was known, on top of everything else, as the cricket school in Jamaica.

Today, however, only a few boys at the school play the game - to the extent that the school, the same school that in Rae and Pat Rousseau produced two West Indies board presidents, that in Rae and Hendriks produced two Jamaica board presidents, is no longer, for a long time now, numbered among the best.

The sad truth is that Wolmer's, the school that, in players like batsmen O. J. Cunningham, L.V. Dujon, Sidney Abrahams, Paul Buchanan, Sam Morgan, Frederick Redwood, left-arm spinner Robert Scarlett and off-spinner Alford Givance, produced a number of Jamaica representatives, and in batsman/wicketkeeper Clive Wynter, off-spinning all-rounder Max Campbell, batsmen Milton Powell and Micky West, left-arm spinner Michael Archer, bats-man/wicketkeeper Jeffrey Mordecai, batsman/wicketkeeper Wilton Scott and batsman Wayne Sutherland, also produced some of the most talented schoolboy cricketers over the years, does not today even put out a Junior Colts team.

Wolmer's, however, hope to change all that, and they hope to do so by playing more Twenty/20 cricket in the school and especially so at the level where the boys are introduced to the game.

On Saturday at Wolmer's there will be a Twenty/20 cricket festival. It will feature the school team against an old boys' team, and that match will feature schoolboy John Ross Campbell, who scored two centuries in the Grace Shield this year, and old boys like Foster, Dujon, Breese, Baugh and Pagon - the latest of the Wolmerians who have represented Jamaica and the West Indies.

'Twenty/20 cricket has become so popular that it not only pulls in capacity crowds wherever it is played, but a Twenty/20 World Cup is also on the way.'