During the Indian T20 season, observers did wonder if the game was broken. The curators are getting better at delivering predictable tracks that are good for batting. The Impact Player added extra depth to the batting, freeing batters of the repercussions of a mishit. Mishits anyway travelled. Batters have got better at hitting sixes too. Offspinners are almost extinct. Left-arm spinners managed only if they have a second skill. Bowling became more and more irrelevant.
You wondered where it was all headed. At the heart of the concern was: had batters become simply too good for conditions and bowling to matter? Impact Player had played no small role, altering the balance between bat and ball significantly.
These two matches in Ireland, though, should be evidence enough that while the batters have improved at hitting sixes through hours of range hitting and physical conditioning, conditions are still a significant part of the sport.
Arguably Ireland's greatest triumph in cricket, a 2-0 blanking of double world champions India who had not lost a series in three years, is a reminder that six-hitting is not as easy as some of these batters make it look in the IPL or in standardised conditions in international cricket.
You might have laughed if someone would have told you India will take until the 18th over to hit their first six in a match, that too a hail mary in desperation. Perhaps India will get better at hitting sixes on spongier tracks with a bit of early seam movement if they practise there for a week or so, but their helplessness on these two days with hardly any time to acclimatise was something to behold.
The first match can be dismissed as a bit of a bluster from a team flying high and almost all of them holing out before earning the right to hit sixes. In the second match they actually tried to time the chase. Tilak Varma looked to take it deep with Axar Patel and Shivam Dube, but in the face of Ireland's superior knowledge of conditions they just kept finding fielders almost every time they tried to take more than what was on offer.
Try as they might, India just couldn't hit sixes when Ireland bowled to their field, which is not the case in the IPL or in most other international T20 cricket. Once again Ireland outscored India down the ground. This time by more than double: 64 runs in the "V" to India's 31. Despite improvement in every aspect of their game, India were still not able to make Ireland take on the bigger square boundaries as often as they did it to India.
Ireland needed this shot in the arm badly after a largely disappointing T20 World Cup and not enough cricket despite being a Full Member of the ICC. They were also missing five seam bowlers and Paul Stirling with the bat. They won this series by scrapping with the bat and then bowling to immaculate plans. One of the bowlers is a specialist left-arm spinners. An offspinner closed out the second match. Bowling mattered. Conditions mattered.
Apart from being a great result for the underdogs, this series is also a bit of relief for those who worried if conditions had become totally irrelevant in T20s.