“He’s gone for a toss!” exclaims the mirth-filled commentator in the new-concept ‘party hall’ which used to be mundanely known as ‘cricket stadium’. T20’s changed the parlance.

T20, for the uninitiated, is not yet another code for a set of trains plying the Sydney Rail network (there’s T2 and T6 there, for example.) T20 happens to be a version of cricket; a genre; the lipstick-and-rouge, makeup-and-eyeliner, glitz-and-bling sibling of grey-bearded, dour-and-measured, Test cricket.

It’s a party with a sense of finiteness. Three hours and a few minutes to ‘do your thing’, then everybody heads home to rehydrate. It is garish, in-your-face, loud and filthy rich. It is said, despite its apparent rebelliousness against established principles, this youngest sibling (showing a sense of care and maturity above its apparent teenage years) helps finance the doddering elder, keep it on its feet, account for the number of matches played in vast echoing stadiums where sometimes, it seems, a few men and their dogs have wandered in by mistake and stayed.

It is also, in a sense ironic, that this order of things has to be maintained: For this wealthy gadfly, T20, apparently needs its eldest sibling around for ... (forever, as a matter of fact,) because in the scheme of things, a cricketer isn’t deemed complete until he’s made his mark in the (sometimes empty, echoing) halls of Test cricket. That’s how things stack up.

All the aforementioned, of course, was patiently imparted to two visiting Australians to the subcontinent. They themselves, in what may surprise cricketing aficionados worldwide, haven’t a clue as to what cricket is. They are self-proclaimed ‘footy’ freaks. Footy being a hugely popular game in Ozland and in no way resembling football, although there are times when the oval shaped footy ball is kicked.

Footy, for the uninitiated, is a rough-tough sport with a huge emphasis on physical, men-built-like-fridges grappling with each other mightily for a ball. Rugby-ish.

Anyhow, the two Aussie visitors have arrived after an incredible journey from their hotel to the ground, seated in a motorised tri-wheeler, sometimes referred to as a tuk tuk, in the hustle and bustle of what they’ve been told is the densest populated place on earth. They can believe that because their vehicle made a lofty pretence of travelling but going nowhere, buoyed by a cacophony of horns that did their best to provide some form of impetus.

Somehow, they arrived at the ground where the party atmosphere was something they quickly took to, as ducks to water. Now they have radios in their ears, with the commentator bellowing richly: “He’s gone for a toss.” And as if in sequence to his words, the large television screen at the ground replays the action, once, twice.

The drama is not occurring at the centre, on the cricket pitch, where one would imagine a batsman has slipped and fallen. No. It has unfolded at the very edge, beyond the boundary and the advertising boards at mid-wicket. One of the batsmen swung his willow in a textbook-unrecommended arc and sent the ball sailing over the boundary straight into a posse of cameramen perched behind their long probing lenses waiting for the ‘money shot’.

What must it have looked like for that one lensman watching that orb, like a meteorite out of control, blazing a path straight for him? Getting larger and larger by the millisecond? What was his thought process in such an unfamiliar scenario? What were his reactions? Knock the expensive camera out of the way? In doing so expose himself to the homing missile?

I believe in such situations reactions are at best confused. One just leaps out of the way. Self-preservation kicks in. And leaping triggers consequences. “He’s gone for a toss!” laugh both the Aussies side-splittingly, after the second replay, by which time the fallen cameraman has time to poke his head guiltily above the hoarding and deliver a guilty smile as though he’d been caught in public doing something naughty.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.