No loud appeals as tests put to sword
All quiet on cricket front as five-day internationals fade away
It might seem a curious time to announce this, with the foul weather yet to loosen its shackles, but now is the summer of our discontent.
It is bad enough test cricket is under attack from life itself — imagine sitting down now to try to invent a sport and proposing a game that would take five full days to complete — but it’s even worse that it’s being sabotaged by its custodians. Who’s going to save it? The above paragraph breaks one of the golden column-writing rules: “Thou shall not pose a question that you cannot answer?”, but truth is I have no idea.
It won’t be you lot. Even with a whole lot of baby-boomers hitting retirement age and looking for ways to spend all their dosh, we’re not going to suddenly fill stadiums for five days.
It just isn’t how spoilt-for-choice New Zealanders live now. We dip in and out of test cricket and that’s fine but the metrics don’t work for stadium management, cricket administrators, or . . .
. . . Broadcasters. They’re not going to save it (though they could stay its execution). It costs a lot to televise a test. In this country at least, it costs more than the return they get for it. Far better for them the shortest format.
It won’t be plaintive cries from the media. Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber put together the excoriating
Death of a Gentleman (I urge you to watch it). It should have a far greater impact than it did, but as the late Martin Crowe once wrote: “The ICC, as we know, is an oligarchy.”
The recent release of New Zealand’s international schedule all but confirmed that those most capable of releasing the lifeboats will also look the other way.
Just four tests, all of them to be played in long-sleeve, cableknit wear weather.
In between the second test of the upcoming season and the third there will be 95 days where fans will not see a red ball, will not hear commentators thrum out test cricket’s lilting rhythms, will not engage with sport’s evolutionary high point.
Test cricket is being treated as a necessary evil. Soon it won’t be necessary. And when tests become a novelty, how much longer before administrators target the expensive first-class competitions that underlie them?
(That is a question I can answer: not long at all.)
Ergo, the administrators won’t save it.
The players might not be able to save it but they could do a lot more than they are to apply pressure if they love the five-day game as much as they say they do.
There’s been barely a squeak since the schedule was released. I’ve heard from a number of people that a number of players are genuinely unhappy but until I actually hear it from the horse’s mouth — or the horse’s twitter feed — it’s worthless babble.
As is this, ultimately. I cannot save tests. I can’t even watch as much of them as I once could.
But I can, and will, lament their painful demise.
Test cricket is being treated as a necessary evil. Soon it won’t be necessary.