Test cricket in ICU?

There seems to be a collective paranoia out there. Almost every test match these days is either a reassurance of the grandness and the greatness of the real game of cricket or the warning signs of a soon to be extinct breed of Cricket. Ever since the advent of T-20 and more so since India won the inaugural T-20 world cup and the launch of IPL a couple of years ago, there seems to be an exaggerated concern for the format of the game which has withstood many a crisis from imperialism to world war to the more contemporary 26/11 kind of horrors, hell even cricketers were targeted during a test series in Pakistan. Test cricket’s reaction to all these events has been only one – “Move on”. Its rather puzzling that the soul of a game of such resilience is being severely tested by that all evil thing called money – not USD, not Euro or GBP but the one which gets printed at Nasik by the Reserve Bank of India – it’s a different story that all IPL transactions are USD denominated (currency of the country which is as alien to cricket as George Bush is to common sense!).

Or at least that’s what the mainstream media wants us to feel! But that’s what media has always done – to propagate the story which is easy to propagate (*like how Securitization, greedy Wall Street bankers and the rating agencies were the culprits behind the sub-prime crisis! – What about those who bought a house without even having a stable income???). It’s very easy to equate the current situation to the Kerry Packer days but that would be incorrect. The common theme might be money but unlike Packer, IPL is not a rebel league, also cricketers of today even outside of the IPL world are very well paid professionals which was not the case during Packer days. And the Cricketers are not being cornered to take on either/or stance between country and club, between test cricket and T-20. No wonder that none of the players (outside of Chris Gayle that is!) who’s worth his salt to play test cricket has shown the remotest of inclinations to prefer T-20 over tests.

If that is the stance from players, what about the fans? All IPL matches were full-houses and test match attendance record in India is not much to boast about is a fair argument. But even in pre- T20 days, we didn’t have the greatest of attendance for test cricket outside of the traditional test venues but at the same time ODI matches witnessed full houses wherever it was hosted. This is nothing new. Frankly how many of us have woken up to this realization that T-20 is the new thing to follow and that test cricket is boring, time consuming and out of fashion! I have gotta be out of my senses to believe that the viewership for test cricket has reduced after the advent of T-20. What has happened is that T-20 has expanded the cricket viewership to people who weren’t following cricket before. Bringing new audience to a game is no crime I reckon! But how do we care, we have to blame it on something. So we conveniently blame it on those things which are in the news - T20, IPL, Lalit Modi, etc...

As I have said before Test Cricket and T20 are almost as distinct in character as two different sports for them to cannibalize each other – if anything they can only feed onto each other. We haven’t seen anything dramatic in the world of test cricket of late that we haven’t seen before that warrants such a large-scale alarm for its imminent extinction. Ian Chappell is talking about a 3-day test as a possible solution and Sourav is complaining about how dead pitches might kill test cricket – as contrasting as ay two opinions on a subject can be. If we crib about not producing a result in 5 days, surely shortening the duration is the last solution we want to implement. I fully endorse the pitches argument – I think it’s the sole reason for the depreciation in the quality of cricket over the last decade. But having said that I must also add that its not a problem that cropped up overnight, its been depreciating at a steady rate across almost all the grounds in the world for more than 10 years now. WACA is a shadow of its heydays, Gabba which arguably had the best pitch in the world in the 90’s is slowly but surely moving away from its pinnacle, the Caribbean wickets can warrant banning a match for causing danger to the psyche of the bowlers these days – even Ajay Ratra scored a hundred there! Mohall has shown the most accelerated depreciation of all from being the fastest and liveliest track in the country to an absolute dead as dodo stuff now, even Chepauk produced a featherbed for Sehwag last time. It’s a consistent theme in almost all countries except Srilanka which has always produced featherbeds, they really can’t depreciate any more! There used to be so many tests in the nineties where not one batsman from either side scores a hundred but nowadays they order a probe if such an instance happens! But mind you none of this has anything to do with T-20 or the IPL.

Let’s leave all this aside and see how Test cricket has fared in the last few years. For the all hype about T-20’s popularity, the premier event in that format – the world cup in England this year got a lukewarm response from both the fans and the media. At the same time the build up for the Ashes had already started even before THE premier event was over - So much for the death of test cricket! All the Ashes matches witnessed near full houses as well. With the recent sea-saw battle in England, we have had 3 classic Ashes series back to back after an era of thorough Australian dominance of the Ashes, Australia and South Africa produced an absolute humdinger in Australia last year and followed up with a just as exciting return series in SA. India vs Australia rivalry has risen even further in prominence from Sourav vs Waugh days to now with the same intensity and competitiveness if not more. New Zealand was struggling to put a team on the park with the ICL-exodus issue and injuries, but they still fought bravely under the astute leadership of Vettori. England seems to heading in the direction under Andre Strauss. Srilanka is not doing too badly either. Outside of B’ladesh and West Indies, its quite a competitive battlefield in test cricket these days. Over the next few months any team out of Australia, South Africa or India can be the No.1 team in the world – damn, when was the last time Test Cricket was so healthy.

So it’s not the T-20 vs Tests or the fans preference for one over the other which is the real problem here. Cricket and its followers are dynamic enough to allow the co-existence of all 3 formats at the same time. As much as the game has the appetite for all the 3 formats of the game, it doesn’t quite have the resources – especially TIME. This is where the administrators need to pull up their socks for once and ensure appropriate allocation of the precious resource of time across the 3 formats. India is scheduled to play 6 tests in a year – really, it’s a shame! (But even that is not a new phenomenon, during the peak of our masala ODI matches here, there and everywhere India played only one test in a year’s time in 1996-97!). ICC needs to go back to its drawing board and come out with an alternative to that now outdated FTP – stipulate a minimum number of test matches for all the test playing nations, need to set aside a month for IPL - its better than fighting a losing battle, put a cap on the number of ODIs organized outside of the scheduled program – no more seven ODI series please…, have a T-20 world cup twice a year and ODI world cup once in 4 years (I might sound stupid for stating the obvious only if you didn’t know that there’s another T-20 world cup coming up in 2010 in WI. Pak were the world champions for a monumental 300 odd days!!!)

Sachin Tendulkar started his career at a time when even ODI’s were not as popular leave alone T-20’s and his debut series was a dull as dead 0-0 result in a 4 match test series and now completed his 20th year on the road with another yawn inducing draw against Srilanka at Motera. A lot has changed in the game of cricket in those 20 years but outside of the quality of pitches none has impacted test cricket too adversely – surely not T-20 or IPL!

* Hangover of FRM...