The Worm Turns

GH on a good week for Test cricket

It’s been said for a while that every Test match is a referendum on the format’s future. But just lately, it’s felt like a referendum whose outcome is foreordained.  The number of Test nations is confidently predicted to contract.  The number of Tests will dwindle further, and be permissible only in downtimes from franchise T20.  The market forces made us do it, the world’s boards claim, oblivious to their being the market forces.  To claim otherwise is to interfere with the primal forces of nature.

All the more reason, then, to salute last week’s parallel Test matches in which the poor and striving (New Zealand, Pakistan) beat the wealthy and pampered (India, England).  The toss was a salient factor in both games. Rohit Sharma zigged when he should have zagged. Shan Masood granted his team the opportunity to bat when conditions were easiest.  Rapid drainage was a boon in Bangalore; artificial desiccation a factor in Multan.  Otherwise the contest was as fair, and in the end satisfying, as could be.

New Zealand, who had just been rinsed by Sri Lanka, faced Indian opponents who had won their last six Tests with ease.  They were without their best batter and bowler of the last decade. India, reducing New Zealand to seven for 233 in their first innings, and surging to three for 408 in their second innings, threatened to drag the match back after its dramatic opening exchanges. An opportune ball change may have been material.  

Pakistan, who had lost their last six Tests heavily, faced English opponents who had won twenty of their last thirty. Their selectors, now ex their captain and coach, omitted their most potent batter and pace bowlers of the last decade. England, who had been reunited with their talismanic captain, were at one point in their first innings 145 in arrears with eight wickets standing, including the pair who, in the previous match on the self-same pitch, had compiled Test cricket’s fourth highest partnership. But then….

Lots was different too.  In Bangalore, the overhead conditions fluctuated; in Multan, they were pitilessly unchanging.  In Bangalore, spin was expensive; in Multan, spin was penetrative and cheap.  But these were tense, exciting, skilful, thoroughly involving, and completely unexpected Tests to toggle back and forth between, full of fresh names to conjure with (Rachin Ravindra, Sarfaraz Khan, Kamran Ghulam) and old stagers to salute (Tim Southee, Matt Henry, Noman Ali).

A further common thread is that where both India and England spend helluva lot of time these days philosophising about their bravura approach to staid old Test cricket, New Zealand and Pakistan don’t enjoy that luxury. Rather are they underdogs from central casting, beset by financial and governance challenges.  New Zealand Cricket’s CEO has described playing Test cricket as ‘incredibly challenging’, and said quite openly: ‘If I took a pure business lens at New Zealand Cricket, we would be playing nothing but T20.’  The Pakistan Cricket Board, increasingly a plaything of the country’s political elite, is so broke it cannot pay its players.  The ICC stands by with its footling ‘Test match fund’ as the IPL prepares to carve the world up in Saudi Arabia.  And yet, when it’s eleven versus eleven, and the game is on the line, anything’s possible. Just imagine how great global cricket could be were it not mainly run by cowards and carpet baggers.

Pakistan hosting Tests with England; India hosting Tests with New Zealand - not exactly marquee series, eh?  This is exactly the kind of bilateral cricket that we think could probably be sacrificed without too much cost, and would probably be first to disappear in the predicted new dispensation - a calendar of franchise T20 relieved only by an annual big three Test series a la Wimbledon. But this would, of course, pretty soon be as boring as all get-out.  This last week, then, reminds us, once again, if anyone is still listening, that we should cease regarding Test cricket as something quaint it will be nice to keep a bit of if we can afford it, and invest in because it is integral to the game’s health, biodiversity and abiding appeal.