All right, I'm just going to come out and say it ... I love T20 cricket.

It puts me at odds with most of my colleagues at The Mercury sports desk who treat the red-ball game like some transcendent glimpse of a heaven only the rusted-on cricket tragics will ever glimpse or understand. I swear they beg for a draw just so they can enjoy a sherry and opine loudly with their pinkie fingers out that the plebs just don't get how beautiful it is to endure five days of meandering action for no result.

Don't get me wrong, this columnist is no mere casual fan of our national game and enjoyed this summer's Test series as much as anybody, including the thrilling draw at the SCG when the previously frail Indian tail held off a late Australian advance. It was edge-of-the-seat stuff, enthralling as any win without the post-match jubilation.

But after days of watching batsmen plod away on the welcome mats Australian curators rolled out this summer, am I the only one who felt a slight relief at flicking over to Channel 10 to watch some blokes smash a few balls over the fence? It would appear I'm not, given that television ratings for Nine's coverage of the Tests was down on last year while the Big Bash League has rocketed Channel 10 up the ratings chart.

And it's about more than just the product. While the football codes are locked year in, year out in a desperate battle for the hearts and minds - and let's not forget the dollars - of the Australian sporting public, cricket's virtual monopoly on the summer sports market can make the sport lazy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Nine's coverage of the cricket. Again, the knitted-sweater brigade no doubt lap up Ian Chappell's long-winded yarns about how "Gary" Sobers used to turn his big toe slightly toward point for leverage but for the average punter, it's a tad tired. For the younger viewers the voices of our more recently retired heroes Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Mark Waugh and Mike Hussey hold more appeal.

Add guest stints from Freddie Flintoff, Kevin Pietersen and the uber-cool Viv Richards and it's certainly much friendlier on young ears. Sure the pastel colours make them look like textas with the wrong coloured lids on but it's almost the lone criticism.

Throw in rock music, mic'd up players, helmet cam and other innovations and it's a hell of a package that's broadening and diversifying cricket's fanbase.

The sport now offers something for everyone.

As for the product itself, suggestions that T20 poses a threat to the long-form cricket — a charge once also levelled at the "pyjama game" that in a month's time will put the game on a world stage behind only the Football World Cup and the Olympics — are misplaced.

So are suggestions the format is detrimental to a batsmen's game. We need look no further than AB de Villiers — long regarded as the world's best Test batsmen — and his incredible innings of 149 off just 44 balls in Johannesburg this week. Yes, yes, I know it was a 50-overs match, but the innovative, unconventional shots, the acute awareness of where every fieldsmen was for every ball, awareness of the short boundaries, the lack of balls required to reach the milestone and the sheer ferociousness of it; it's a mindset and a skill set players just didn't have before the T20 phenomenon.

Our own David Warner — once written off as nothing more than a short-form slogger — has transformed himself into one of the world's best and certainly most-feared opening Test batsmen.

The two form batsmen of the Australian Test summer, Steve Smith and Virat Kohli, along with some beautiful traditional strokeplay peppered their long innings' with unconventional shots honed in the short form. Their success in all forms is proof that no form of cricket is detrimental to another, the cream will always rise to the top. The new arsenal possessed by the modern batsmen leaves no place for defensive, unimaginative captaincy from fielding captains in the Test arena — as former Indian skipper MS Dhoni found out this summer.

Purists will continue to wear dress pants and tucked-in collared shirts to 40-degree days at the cricket and scoff at T20 ('an abbreviation for an abbreviated game' I hear them say). But for the rest, T20 simply rocks.