English cricket 'invented' Twenty20 when the sport's shortest format was pioneered 14 years ago. Here, Press Association Sport details the key moments in Twenty20's subsequent global development:
2001 - The England and Wales Cricket Board presented the radical idea of a new professional format, the brainchild of the governing body's marketing manager Stuart Robertson. It was agreed by an 11-7 vote in favour from county chairmen.
2003 - The inaugural Twenty20 Cup took place, and was won by Surrey Lions. It would evolve in later years into the Friends Provident t20 in 2010 and, most recently, the NatWest T20 Blast.
2004 onwards - The world began to catch on as first South Africa, then Pakistan, Australia and the West Indies - in the Stanford 2020, and more recently Caribbean Premier League - joined the party.
2005 - Women's cricket had, as with the inaugural one-day international World Cup more than 30 years earlier, already taken the plunge with an England-New Zealand match in summer 2004. But there was no international men's version until Australia beat New Zealand at Auckland in February 2005. Confidence in the format was still fragile, and the teams played in throwback kits - New Zealand in their 'Beige Brigade' 1980s outfit - in a diffident gambit to bring some fun to proceedings but supporters quickly bought into Twenty20 internationals. England went on to beat Australia in the first Twenty20 international in this country in June 2005.
2007 - The first ICC World Twenty20 tournament was a game-changer - because it convinced India that they should be at the heart of proceedings. Cricket's sub-continent powerhouse had been notably reticent, but a five-run victory over arch-rivals Pakistan in the Johannesburg final ended the scepticism and laid the foundations for the juggernaut Indian Premier League.
2008 - The response in India was the establishment of an Indian Cricket League and then the Indian Premier League. The ICL, run privately by Zee Entertainments, withered and died after just two seasons but the IPL - with its glitzy annual player auctions - has a massive profile through April and May each year. It attracts big-money signings from home and abroad, increasingly including England. Despite spot-fixing controversies in 2012 and 2013, the draw of the IPL is unprecedented for any domestic tournament.
2011 - Australia decided it was high time it got involved and instituted its own competition, the Big Bash - which has grown year on year and is often held up, alongside the IPL, as the template for how to run a franchise Twenty20 tournament. Further national competitions have followed - the CPL in the West Indies, while South Africa's dates back almost as far as England's to 2003-04. A Champions League tournament, involving domestic winners from around the word, flourished for a time but ended in 2015.
2015 - The ECB continued to cast envious glances at what was being achieved elsewhere, on the back of English cricket's original idea. Under new chairman Colin Graves, it resolved to launch a wide-ranging consultation to consider the feasibility of a high-profile new tournament to add to the Blast.
2016 - A September show-of-hands vote at an ECB meeting endorsed further consideration of an eight-team format, by 16-3 from the first-class counties and MCC.
2017 - By the end of March, it appeared clear at an ECB presentation to the counties and other stakeholders that any resistance to change had crumbled - giving Graves the mandate to trigger the necessary change in constitution to allow, as a one-off instance, plans to press ahead for a competition to start in 2020 which will involve just eight city-based teams rather than all 18 counties.
Source: PA
