BEST FOR CRICKET

Simon Heffer: Why five-day Test matches are here to stay

With the first two Test matches between England and West Indies going well into a fifth day – albeit down to interruptions by the weather – the arguments about cutting the standard duration of the game to four days from 2023 would appear to be over.

This must be good. The whole point of Test cricket is to establish once and for all which of two sides are the better, and a game played without too many contrivances to try to obtain a result must be preferable to the alternative.

As it was, so much play was lost at Old Trafford that it took Ben Stokes’s pyrotechnic performance in England’s second innings to enable a declaration in time to allow them to bowl the visitors out. Had the match lasted four days, a result would have been impossible.

However, before we get too smug, we should recall that the reasons why the call went up in the first place for four-day matches have not been addressed.

Apart from in Australia, England and India, crowds for Test cricket are usually dismal. This is not least because of the marginalising of first-class cricket around the world, and the failure to market it and capture public interest for the red-ball game. Tickets for Test matches are enormously expensive, which has driven away support among young people and from the less well off.

Short-format cricket has taken over and is increasingly given scheduling priority over the first-class game. One of the reasons to reduce the amount of time spent playing Tests was to increase the amount available for the lucrative white-ball formats.

Also, it has become apparent that many Test players play so little first-class cricket that they cannot adapt from the one-day format, so batsmen in particular struggle to build a big innings. Therefore matches end much more quickly than they used to.

In 2014, 66 per cent of Tests ended on a fifth day; by 2019 it was just 33 per cent. It was not least because so many matches in recent years had finished within four days, even allowing for weather interruptions, that the debate started in the first place.

Dom Sibley’s century at Old Trafford showed the skill is still there for batsmen to hold a side together, Boycott-like, but it requires concentration; Stokes can play any sort of game he is asked to, but he is not usual.

Test cricket is a very special game, and the obsession with the one-day match is killing it.

Teams often do not complete even 90 overs in a day, which is a fraud on the paying public

If the five-day game is to be secured for the long term, then some things must change.

First, flexibility is important. As when England played Ireland last year, some fixtures between sides at different ends of the seeding table might benefit from being shorter, at least until teams new to Test cricket learn the ropes and move closer to their opponents in skill.

Equally, in Tests played on the subcontinent or in the West Indies during the English winter, where dusk falls early, there might even be a case for six-day matches. It is easy to forget that before the war many Tests were timeless, including all those played at home by Australia. The last timeless Test, between South Africa and England at Durban in 1939, was abandoned on the ninth playing day because the boat taking the England team home was due to sail.

It would not be a good idea to revert to timeless Tests; they were stopped in the first place because the unpredictability of their length played havoc with scheduling and these days they would allow even more hanging around, posing and drinks breaks that have taken the over rate to an unreasonably low level.

Another problem with Test cricket is that teams often do not complete even 90 overs in a day – and certainly hardly ever without going into extra time – which can make the game turgid and is also a fraud on the paying public.

Hourly drinks breaks are unnecessary except on very hot days, and a way must be found to speed up the review system, even if it means handing the process over to a computer that can make a split-second decision.

If Test cricket returned to the 100 over-plus a six-hour day that was common half a century ago, the game would have more momentum and might just become more popular.

Another case for the argument to have four-day Tests was to reduce workload. Sticking at five days, and beefing up championship cricket to help sustain a decent Test side, would be a further imposition on the best players. In turn, that presses the argument for two codes, where players concentrate on one form or the other. Then there is no pressure on the Test calendar at all.

But England need to be aware that the way things are going in several Test-playing countries, and unless there is concerted action to reverse the trend, the pool of their opponents is likely to shrink, even if the length of games does not.