Testing times for the future of cricket
A manifesto on the urgent need to restructure the national leagues? No, that would only have got you out of a hole since the 1920s.
A lecture on the creeping scourge of unsporting conduct in football? Or there’s the puzzled reflection on the need for rugby to exist at all.
And you could also, in any decade, have fretted about the very future of Test cricket. So here we go again, for old times’ sake.
Sound the klaxons, toot your horn, tinkle your bicycle bell, retweet. Use whatever means you can to raise the alarm. And for the love of God, fret. For the very future of Test cricket appears, again, to be at stake.
At least according to the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2012, the sport’s annually-updated New Testament, Test cricket now “stands at a precipice”.
First, some clarifications. It’s far from the Wisden I was reared. To suggest it has been a regular fixture on my bedside locker, facilitating an emergency midnight clarification of WG Grace’s no-ball stats, would be a deceit on par with pretending to have been able to finish Kerouac’s On The Road.
Furthermore, the scale of my genuine concern for Test cricket’s future may not trigger many concern detection devices. I reserve the human right to be as bored as the next man watching two sets of batsmen spend five days piling up 800 runs apiece on billiard table wickets that wouldn’t offer Alastair Campbell spin. But it’s something you’d like to keep going all the same, like the local post office. And the Wisden, with its 1,500 pages and 149 editions, is not, by its nature, an alarmist, kneejerk publication.
So we should fret. Which is a pity, especially in a week when Sky Sports 4 brought us to Barbados and allowed Australia and West Indies fill that tricky slot between Neighbours and Judge Judy with fine entertainment. In the end, the Aussies fought off the dying of the light to win it, after captain Michael Clarke declared their first innings when still 43 behind, just the second time in Test history such a counterintuitive move has prospered. The small joys of strategy.
Would the result have been different had spinner Sunil Narine not passed up the Windies call to play Twenty20 in India instead, where IPL side Kolkata Knight Riders offered big bucks and surely a talking car too? Narine’s prioritising of rupees over reputation is symptomatic of the place cricket finds itself. Private money pours into the game — mainly in Asia — but all for the shorter, flashier format.
Wisden 2012 rounds on T20 as “a Pandora’s box masquerading as a panacea”, dismissing it as a “playful scrap” that undermines the game’s fundamental pillar; the Test.
And Wisden 1913 warned us not to pander to mushed attention spans.
“Cricket does not stand in need of alterations. When played in the proper spirit, the game is as good as ever it was. It must not be tampered with to please people who vainly think that it can have the concentrated excitement of an hour-and-a-half’s football.”
Tamper they have and now, with empty grounds, TV disinterest and falling incomes, everyone but England is gradually turning away from the Test match. But feeling sympathy for the ECB is like shedding tears for a bank that has turned a loss. Together with the ICC, it has conspired for too long to shut associate nations like Ireland off from cricket’s main revenue streams.
But, magnanimous to a fault, I’ll give them the solution anyway; a genuine Test World Cup, not the piecemeal fudge with four nations the ICC considered, cancelled because nobody was interested.
My Test World Cup will haul eight qualifiers to one base every four years for two round-robin groups, semis and a final. The matches will be full five-day Tests but, and here’s where our skittish minds are catered for, several will be played at the same time. Split-screen technology, red buttons, Soccer Saturday-style panels. ‘How Things Stand’ opportunities. Most importantly, just two nations will gain invites to the next edition, so every Test match in between will double as a qualifier, with associates given a fair shot.
Get it organised. Anything to ensure that, in 100 years’ time, someone will get to write all this again.
