In Defence of Test Cricket

Last year brought us Allen Stanford’s super-series. The billionaire has been pumping money into the dying beast of Caribbean cricket for years, but he stepped up this year by offering $20 million in a winner-takes-all, three hour, cricket extravaganza between the England team, and the Stanford Superstars, a team of West Indians whose reputations by and large ill-fitted their billing. I was not the only one who felt this affair, well, a little tawdry.

The England team were uneasy about the whole thing, as were the hitherto blindly loyal Barmy Army, who declined to support their team en masse. Stanford’s aim was to get American audiences into cricket, (the game was broadcast live on ESPN), a demographic of sports fan generally used to baseball as the longest possible sport, weighing in at around four hours per game. And this after the glitzy, glamorous, insanely boring IPL. Weeks on end of exciting, deeply low-quality, mass-produced cricket.

Real cricket, Test cricket, takes five days. That’s thirty hours of cricket, with daily lunch breaks, daily tea breaks, and drinks in between. That is a bloody long time, but if Guinness taught us anything, it is that good things come to those who wait. Cricket gets a lot of stick for being boring, and, actually, I can sympathise with that. It goes on forever. But that’s what makes Test cricket such a brilliant vehicle for confrontation.

There is no time limit, or at least the limit that there is rarely constrains. Even a great football match has, ultimately, to end after 90, or 120 minutes, and the ball travels about the pitch, so everyone is involved. A Test confrontation lasts as long as the players are mentally strong enough to make it last, and an individual battle lasts as long as the individuals involved can stay out there. There will be no having a breather when the ball is up the other end.

There are few honourable draws as the final whistle blows; one of you needs to submit. Limited-overs cricket cannot match this. It is no epic victory for a bowler when he dismisses someone who just walked across his stumps and swung and missed in an effort for quick runs. In Tests, your only imperative is to survive as long as possible. And a battle for survival for survival’s sake is far more compelling than for the crude sake of a few runs. Tests are the purest test of your cricketing skill.

That’s probably how they came to be so called. The contest ends when you are not good enough, mentally or physically to continue. Kevin Pietersen, a sporting gladiator in most senses of the term, is to be trusted when he says that “Twenty20 is here to stay and is the future of coloured clothes cricket but white clothes separate the men from the boys.”

The random element to one-day games may make them more unpredictable, but I would contend that this makes them more false. There is a reason Bangladesh only ever win one-day games. Five days is too long to be lucky.

I watch a hell of a lot of sport, to the chagrin of my family, and my tutors, and I can think of few sports that afford such an intense raw conflict as a Test Match. Tennis matches, come close, and like anyone who saw it, I was gripped by Federer-Nadal at Wimbledon this year, but cricket’s real hook is the asymmetry between the competitors. Federer-Nadal was great, but they were for long stretches merely negating each other by both, to be crude, hitting a ball hard at each other.

Batsmen, are, obviously, not bowlers, and the skill-sets demanded of each are totally different. The mutual incomprehension between great bowlers and batters is what makes the contests great. Contrast cricket’s great confrontations. We all have our favourites. My personal one is Atherton-Donald in the Nottingham Test in 1998. Both had a match to win. The only way Donald knew how was to run in and bowl extremely quickly, and he must have wondered how Atherton could stand up to him, and why he would even want to.

Both subsequently admitted in their autobiographies thereafter that for that hour on the fourth day, neither of them were truly thinking about the match, but about beating each other. There was time for winning matches tomorrow, but just then, it was just them. Nobody who has seen it ever forgets it, and nobody who only ever watches limited overs cricket will ever see anything like it. And that would be a tragedy.

Cricket is far from physical. Having played a lot of cricket, I’ve found it is actually pretty difficult to get genuinely tired whilst playing, even if the next day your body screams at you. It is small bursts of energy, expended frequently. In that way, it is less demanding than, say football. You can’t make Torres play five days in a row, ‘cos he’ll die. Anything good he is going to do, he’ll do it in the 90 minutes, and the nature of football is such that even in his best game, there will still be less time spent watching him than watching other people.

Footballers’ great deeds are a flash of lightning in a 90 minute stargaze. Cricket manifests brilliance in a different way. At its best, it gives an opportunity to watch sustained brilliance for hours on end. It isn’t that Shane Warne bowled the odd stunning ball which made everyone gasp. We gasped again and again. Any idiot, including the idiot writing for you now, can bowl one good ball, even if its once a season, (and last season, I surpassed myself and still only bowled three). He did it time after time.

Why, why, why, when he is capable of doing it for hours on end, would we restrict him to 10 overs per game?

The point is even more acute for batsmen. It is a skill that shouldn’t be forced or rushed. Asked what the greatest innings they have seen are, I know of few cricket fans who talk of Jayasuriya running wild in one-day games, even if he was a sight to behold at his best. Far more often, Lara’s 153 at Bridgetown comes up, an innings set against the backdrop of three days of intense cricket, not just three hours.

I don’t really remember great one-day innings I have seen, especially from 20/20 games. More than anything else, swinging with your head in the air and connecting is partly dumb luck, even if, as Gary Player says, the more you practice, the luckier you get.

The best things about cricket flourish best in the Test arena. The players have time to express themselves, free from the shackles of run-rates. Even the spectators have time to express themselves. There is something inherently more soul-affecting about waking up and caring about the same contest as yesterday, rather than the over-too-quickly bonanza of 20/20.

The national pride, emotion, and sheer mass-consciousness that the country experienced in 2005 when England won the Ashes is only something a summer of cricket, played like it was, for as long as it was, with the history that it has, can provide. And then the ECB sold our dreams to the highest bidder, and we forgot about them.

Limited-overs cricket has its place. It does bring in much needed revenue, and generate new interest in the game. But it should still only be a support act for the Platonic form of cricket, Test matches. An American associate of mine who only last year started liking cricket, at my bidding, got into Test matches first.

When he watched his first 20/20, he said to me “it’s a little bit pornographic, don’t you agree?” Porn has its place, and Plato’s Republic has its place. That one is more immediately gratifying than the other is no reason to abandon it.