Twenty 20 cricket is here and it is here to stay. Whilst the purists may be choking on their gin and tonic about how the sport has been corrupted there is no question that the shorter version of the game has been hugely popular around the world. The sport is a marketing man's dream and Razza Mattaz is not a Pakistani squad player.

Big hits, colourful outfits, cheerleaders and music blaring is just what young people with the attention span of a gnat want to see. It is said that a father brings his son to a Test match and a son brings his father to a Twenty 20 game.

What has fascinated me about the World Cup finals is how the game of T20 has evolved. Cricket has always been about the balance between bat and ball. One bouncer an over, strict interpretation of wides and the fact that the batting side had 10 wickets in hand in only 20 overs had me convinced that bowlers were on a hiding to nothing.

Batsmen became more innovative with reverse sweeps, switch hitting, paddle sweeps and ‘scoops'. These new shots became intertwined with good old fashioned bludgeoning of the ball. I nearly choked on my cornflakes one morning when I saw on BBC Breakfast News a new bat had been cleared as legal within the MCC Laws designed to hit the ball further than ever. It looked like a club to me and I started to panic. Could Twenty 20 eventually evolve into baseball?

I started to have apocalyptic visions of a World Series where baseball and T20 cricket were merged into a ‘sport' called Compromise rules. One where other nations other than the Ireland and Australian teams could have massive punch ups.

The rules would be designed by committee men in a darkened room. The decisions would not be scrutinised and would be final. Soon we could have a sport where slogging every ball you face is the norm, you play in front of hostile crowds, players spitting and chewing gum is acceptable and shouting and swearing in an extremely aggressive manner at the umpire is strongly encouraged. Then I relaxed and remembered we already have that in the North West!

What has been brilliant in the T20 World Cup has been the way the bowlers have fought back. They have been every bit as innovative as the batsmen. The bowlers have devised a variety of different deliveries: Bouncers and slow bouncers, yorkers and slow yorkers, deliveries out of the back of the hand and variations of flight.

Ultimately the World Cup Final was contested by Pakistan and Sri Lanka who were the best two bowling sides in the competition. The top five wicket taking bowlers in the entire competition were from the finalists, namely Umar Gul (Pak), Saeed Ajmal (Pak), Lasith Malinga (SL), Ajantha Mendis (SL) and Shahid Afridi (Pak).

Umar Gul of Pakistan and Lasith Malinga of Sri Lanka are two of the best exponents of fast bowling you could ever wish to see in any form of the game of cricket. But they seem to have mastered the art of T20 bowling. Unless you have played the game you can never appreciate just how difficult it is to hit that yorker length ball after ball. To do it consistently at speeds of 90 mph and also at speeds of 75mph with no discernable change in action has to be seen to be believed. Throw into the mix that they were able to produce a little bit of reverse swing into the equation where the ball swings into the feet of the right hander at the last moment then you can understand why it is almost impossible to play. Especially in the last few over's when you are attempting to accelerate the scoring as the innings draws to a close.

Then there are the spin bowlers. Only the sub continent could produce the likes of Ajmal, Afridi, Mendis and Muralidaran. None of them are what you would call orthodox.

Saeed Ajmal looks like a regulation off-spinner except that his stock ball is the doosra, a ball bowled with an off-spinners action but spins like a leg break. His ability to move it both ways and with a control of flight and speed has meant he has troubled all of the leading batsmen.

Shahid Afridi is the ultimate showman. The bigger the stage the better he performs. His bowling is now so good that at least on the T20 stage he is the natural heir apparent of the great Abdul Qadir. Afridi's leg breaks and googlies are bowled at speed with real zip of the pitch. His quicker ball yorker is frightening considering he bowls it off three or four steps at over 80 mph. This is seriously disconcerting when the first warning the batsman has is when the ball is three quarters of the way down the pitch and heading towards the middle stump like an Exocet missile.

Ajantha Mendis is not what you expect from a spin bowler. He looks every inch a little dinky dobbler bowler, a sort of asian Dale Mullan. Throughout the tournament Mendis has made fools out the world's best batsmen. Time after time they have been bowled playing the wrong line or caught leg before wicket after displaying footwork that would embarrass Douglas Bader. Mendis has the ability to bowl orthodox spin and can be a big spinner of the ball as demonstrated when he first appeared on the scene. But these gentle seam up deliveries are given a devilish flick of the middle finger on release which causes the ball to move both ways off the pitch and is almost impossible to pick. The spin is small no more than a few inches but enough to miss a bat.

Murali for years has been the subject of much debate. In Australia he was no balled for his unusual action where his arm was bent. With a bent arm you can easily increase the revolutions on the delivery and thus increase the spin. For a spin bowler this gives a much greater advantage than to a fast bowler (Most people couldn't throw the ball as fast as Brett Lee can bowl it).

But Murali travelled to London to clear his name. His bent arm was due to childhood defect and not a result of an attempt to cheat. He strapped himself up to a harness where it would be impossible to ‘bend' the arm. He then proceeded to bowl a series of deliveries that appeared identical to the series of deliveries bowled without the harness. The high definition camera showed that Murali's prodigious spin was more to do with a wrist that appeared to be made of rubber rather than a crooked arm.

In the end however Pakistan were deserved winners. A top class opening over of aggressive fast bowling by a 17 year old kid called Mohammad Aamer was too hot to handle for Sri Lankan Tillakaratne Dilshan. Until that point Dilshan had been the batting star of the tournament but he was clearly unsettled by the short paced bowling of Aamer and his infamous scoop shot was lamely dinked straight into the hands of Shahzaib Hasan at short fine leg. You just sensed at that moment that Sri Lankan heads dropped and Pakistani chests swelled. As the final progressed the scoreboard may have changed but the body language never did.

The first T20 World Cup in South Africa was a huge success. But this one has been better. The number of runs scored in the two competitions were similar and the run rates and runs per wicket almost identical. Yet the number of sixes hit in the 2009 competition was down by 99 (265 in South Africa compared to 166 in England). Some of that can be attributed to the fact that Johannesburg's altitude helped the big hitters but I prefer to think that 2009 was when the bowlers started to fight back. Even the purists can raise their G&T and join me in saying amen to that.