Threat of shorter breaks should whet the appetite for quicker play
Action is needed to ensure Tests are up to speed rather than being allowed to meander, says
It will not be an irony if the third Test is drawn when another hour of play could have achieved a definite result. It will be a travesty.
That is because the players and umpires have taken 11 overs – or virtually one hour – out of this match through their dilatoriness. Bowlers amble back to their mark, umpires allow subs on to the field to do anything bar field, and captains – instead of conducting at the tempo of Simon Rattle – now take the extra halfhour and a 6.30 pm finish for granted. So a Test match meanders, not rattles, along.
Fines will not work. The only solution is to hit the players and umpires where it hurts, not their pockets but their stomachs.
Take the first morning of a Test: if 30 overs have not been bowled by one o’clock, play on until the quota has been completed and reduce the 40minute lunch interval accordingly. The first session, being dominated by the pace bowlers, is often the slowest of the three – Pakistan bowled 26 overs on the first morning after sending England in – but if the players and umpires see their break cut in half, after taking 20 more minutes to bowl the four extra overs, that will concentrate the mind – and appetite.
The tea break is even more precious as 20 minutes for everyone to put the feet up. So batsmen, who can be just as dilatory if they want, will be working with the bowlers, fielders and umpires to make sure that 60 overs are bowled by then – rather than falling two overs short and seeing their tea break cut in half. Only one bowler in this match has bowled his overs at the desired rate: Pakistan’s wrist-spinner Yasir Shah. England’s spinner, Moeen Ali, would have bowled his overs at a similar rate only a lot of time was spent in fetching the ball back.
Even when England had a righthander and a left-hander batting together, and rotating the strike by taking two singles, Shah bowled his over in two minutes and 20 seconds. Even when Moeen hit Shah for two fours in an over, which required quite a trek for the fielders, he bowled his over in two minutes and 35 seconds.
And while Shah is rattling through his overs, he is not rattling through England any more. His Test career was one long feast up to and including the first Test at Lord’s: 86 wickets in his 13 Tests at 23 runs each. At Old Trafford and Edgbaston it has been the famine of four wickets for 482. There could be no better illustration of what novelty value is worth to a wrist-spinner. If batsmen cannot read him, he is the most potent of all bowlers; when they can, he falls to earth.
On the job England have learned how to play Shah: only straight-batted shots until a batsman is well-set. Then Joe Root might attempt a sweep, or Jonny Bairstow a cut, or Moeen a couple of steps down the wicket to drive. The pitches have changed too. Bowling wicket to wicket, when Lord’s offered him variable bounce, Shah made the ball skid through England’s cross-batted defences: out of his 10 wickets there, four were bowled and four leg-before. Shah’s response, as England have slowly got on top of him, has not been as wily as Shane Warne’s would have been. He has kept on pushing the ball through, as he did when a pro in league cricket in Yorkshire, his priority containment.
Warne would have tried more variety, slowing it down, flighting and turning his leg-break more, tempting batsmen to drive through the offside. Of Shah’s 90 Test wickets, only three have been right-handers stumped.
But Shah’s commitment and stamina have never wavered. He is always ready to bowl, and he usually does from midway through the morning session to the close of play. He bounds up to the stumps, swivels his body and, if a bat does not get in the way of the ball, he is through.
Shah was especially valuable in putting a break on Bairstow and Moeen as they tried to accelerate in the final hour. Shah was probably the difference between England scoring enough runs to declare overnight and their feeling compelled to bat again briefly on the fifth morning – and the difference between England having 10 overs with the second new ball and barely any. And it is just that Shah bowls almost the whole day, otherwise the 90 overs would never be bowled.