Kohli took three seconds to okay D/N Test: Ganguly
KOLKATA: Guess how long it took for India captain Virat Kohli to agree to a day-night Test? Three seconds. That is what Sourav Ganguly, under whose presidency the first pink-ball Test will be hosted at Eden Gardens from November 22 by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), revealed on Saturday.
“Honestly, I don’t know why and what was the reason for their objection or who was involved in the decision,” Ganguly said here on Saturday. He was referring to India’s reported objection to playing a day-nighter in Adelaide during the last Test tour of Australia.
“I met him (Kohli) for an hour and the first question was ‘we need to have day/night Tests’ and the answer in three seconds was, ‘let’s go ahead and do that.’ He realises empty stands in Tests is not the right way forward,” said Ganguly.
Kohli has been a keen advocate of Test cricket and now in Ganguly he has a board president who thinks alike. “Most of the times, change is good. It’s when you’re forced to come out of your comfort zone you actually find out it is better than what you thought. I think pink ball will bring back crowds and that Test cricket needs to be marketed a lot more,” said Ganguly.
“I could not believe that Australia were hosting India in the Adelaide Test (in 2018-19) and the Big Bash was going on in the other part of the country. It was just poor organisation. Proper management of Test cricket will bring back crowds. This (pinkball Test) is a start for India. I think with this concept Test cricket will be back on its feet.”
The setting was the launch of former umpire Simon Taufel’s book ‘Finding The Gaps’. The idea behind the title is to seek through cricket stories how one gets better at, say, people skills, said Taufel. Ganguly said he could easily relate to it because that is what a batsman is supposed to do.
Adjudged the best umpire in the world five times, Taufel said the key to keeping Tests relevant is being adaptable. “I am not sure day-night Tests is the single answer but it will stay unknown until we try,” said the Australian who flew in here on Friday night hours after his mother had passed after recently being diagnosed with cancer. “I was conflicted whether I should tell mom who seemed in fine health eight weeks ago. But I knew if I had told her, she would have said, ‘go.’”
As the Umpire Performance and Training Manager at the International Cricket Council (ICC), Taufel was part of the first day-night Test, in Australia in 2015. For umpires, the routine of essentially supervising five consecutive day-night games is something they will need getting used to, said Taufel.
“We have to prepare strongly and that means strategising, putting in the hard yards. Test cricket is not the environment to radically try things. It needs to happen at a lower level. So we need to get that nursery right, both from a playing perspective and from an officiating one. But positivity is very important because we don’t know until we try.”