Let’s remember why Test cricket is in a league of its own
Proper cricket is an obsessive game and it has obsessed with its future and place in society for hundreds of years. Countless newspaper articles over the past century remind us of how anxious people have been about the slowness of play, rain delays and periods of apparent futility.
But, ultimately, that’s why people still love it.
It has survived for more than two centuries precisely because of its imperfections and the amount of time it takes to play it.
Test cricket will survive forever, but in a marginalised and perhaps, consequently, an enhanced way. Less is more.
As long as we pretend to regard crowd counts as the ultimate way to measure a game’s success, Test cricket will always be a “fail” outside of the Ashes series — and most matches at Newlands.
But that discounts the millions of people who have a passionate interest in Test cricket but who follow it on television, radio or the internet rather than from a stand.
It makes sense, then, to cut the huge costs of Test cricket in large stadiums and move the game to television-friendly venues. They do that beautifully in New Zealand at Dunedin University, where crowds rarely exceed more than 1,000 yet the atmosphere is convivial and intimate rather than “big”. It is made for television. Only the time difference keeps global audience figures low.
Snooker is the ultimate made-for-television production. It is widely followed but, unlike cricket, cheap to cover on a table measuring 12 feet by six feet. It used to require just two cameras but times have changed and now there are as many as 10 — including ultra slow motion in case you missed the amount of backspin on a long pot.
Cricket will always be expensive to cover but it has already moved towards the made-for-television concept with the Canadian T20 League being staged on a field an hour’s drive north of Toronto.
The Maple Leaf Cricket Club really is just a field during the rest of the year but a 7,000seater temporary stand has been erected for the inaugural event, which finishes in about a week’s time.
The usual spread of familiar names has been divided among five local teams, with the sixth team comprising players exclusively from the Caribbean — effectively a West Indies B team (though most of the region’s best players can be found scattered among Canada’s Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal and Winnipeg franchises).
T20 leagues are starting all over the place. The United Arab Emirates will have its own league soon, while its capital, Abu Dhabi, will host SA’s champions, the Titans, with Australia’s Hobart Hurricanes, England’s Yorkshire Vikings, Afghanistan’s Boost Defenders, Pakistan's Lahore Qalandars and another, as-yet-unnamed, team, in a revival of the failed Champions League in October.
Together with the Indian Premier League, the Caribbean Premier League, the Big Bash, Bangladesh Premier League, Pakistan Super League, New Zealand’s Super Smash and England’s imminent “100” tournament, the international schedule barely has room to contemplate an old-fashioned Test tour. Oh, and Sri Lanka also has plans for a new league.
The most recent development on the T20 landscape involves talk of an African Premier League based in Zimbabwe but perhaps including teams based in Nairobi and Windhoek.
It may sound far-fetched, but so did a Canadian League — and Southern Africa has the significant advantage of time zones that provide prime-time viewing throughout Asia, Europe and the Far East.
The abandonment of Cricket SA’s Global League in 2017 has left SA starting from the back of the grid in about 20th place. But they say they are under no illusions about the difficulties in starting and then establishing a league of their own, still planned for the middle of November.
Though there are laudable intentions of increasing exposure and playing opportunities, of “growing the game”, the aim of every one of these tournaments is to make money and it has come to resemble a mad, chaotic scramble towards an overturned cash-in-transit van.
Nobody has any idea how much money is in it, but two things are certain — it isn’t as much as people think and there won’t be enough to go around.
When the crash has been cleaned up and the debris tidied away, cricket administrators and entrepreneurs will do well to remember what the majority of cricket followers loved about the game in the first place, and make that work.