Bowlers start to swing game away from the bat
Glut of wickets in first two days may be the sign of a shift in the balance of power in Test cricket
Ayear ago, ahead of India’s 500th Test match at Kanpur, Sachin Tendulkar broke the habit of a lifetime by giving an interesting interview. Tendulkar was being asked to outline his vision for cricket’s future, and offered an arresting assessment of how the game’s oldest format might survive in a world ever more emphatically defined by Twenty20.
“The future of Test cricket has to be a nice balance between bat and ball,” Tendulkar said. “I sometimes see that the balance is not right. It’s too much in favour of batsmen. In T20, the batters go after the bowlers, and 300 is no longer a safe total in one-day cricket. There has to be a format where bowlers dominate a bit.”
To watch the Lord’s Test over the last couple of days, with the stewards wearing woolly hats and overcoats, the floodlights on and the sun a purely theoretical object, was to see Tendulkar’s vision made flesh. In the hands of Kemar Roach, Ben Stokes, James Anderson and Jason Holder, the ball has zipped around like a sprite. Wickets have fallen faster than the pound, 23 in total, capping a summer in which batting has seemed more difficult than for many years.
This is no isolated phenomenon, either. England’s Test summer has merely been one point in a broader trend that has been evident all over the world. Thus far, this has been Test cricket’s most bowler-friendly year in a generation, with fewer runs, fewer centuries and lower partnerships than in any calendar year since 2000. After the most prolonged period of batsmandominance in the history of the sport, the bowlers are finally fighting back.
Why this might be, however, is far harder to discern. Localised factors have played their part: the vicious turning wickets prepared by India and Bangladesh for the touring Australians, for example, have contributed to a string of low scores. A wet English summer has offered encouragement for seam and swing bowlers; this current series has seen more “magic deliveries” than any other in recent memory. There is also a sense that we are emerging from a golden age of Test batsmen: of the eight highest run-scorers in the game, seven have retired since 2012.
But it is possible to identify some more tectonic shifts that may even indicate the direction in which Test cricket is heading. For a while averages have plummeted – by almost two runs per wicket compared with 2016 – strike rates have not dipped, as you might expect, but actually risen slightly.
There is evidence, too, that this is a change being driven by the younger generation. So far this year, batsmen under 25 have scored their runs around 16 per cent quicker than those over 33, and at a higher average.
This suggests the relentlessly positive approach of teams like Virat Kohli’s India, Joe Root’s England or Kane Williamson’s New Zealand – aggression not merely as a tactic, but as a mantra – is beginning to subtly change the way Test cricket is played.
Older readers will doubtless pin the blame on T20 and one-day cricket for ruining techniques, eroding the art of “classical”, defensive Test match batting. This is surely only true to a certain extent. Bowlers have dominated eras before without any particular moral panic. Just as the run-heavy 2000s were a natural corrective to the 1990s, it may well be that the pendulum is swinging the other way. These things, after all, fluctuate over time. And so perhaps the real story here is Test cricket’s endless capacity for evolution, adaptation, growth.
With scoring rates in white-ball cricket disappearing skywards, perhaps this is Test cricket’s response: an antidote, a curative, a point of difference.
Perhaps, Tendulkar’s words may prove more prophetic than he could have imagined.