SUITS NEED TO WAKE UP AND SMELL THE LEATHER

Derek Pringle says four-day Test cricket will take too much away from the game’s purest and most recognised format

The push for four-day Test matches has started. Men in grey suits with little love of cricket but plenty for the bottom line, are plotting to pare back the most hallowed form of the game in order to format it for our modern lives. Sensible you might think, except that any such change would be a compromise and, for the most uncompromising form of the game, that is simply unacceptable.

The last time Test matches were scheduled over anything less than five days was in 1972/73, when New Zealand played Pakistan over three four-day matches, in which two were drawn.

There are reasons for Tests being played over five days, something enshrined in ICC’s regulations since 1995. The draw is minimised; interruptions by weather can mostly be absorbed without recourse to such artifices as declaration bowling; and generally the team playing the strongest and most forthright cricket wins – the game’s rule of thumb being that the longer the format the more weak teams and weak performances are exposed.

In T20 and 50-over cricket, one player can win the game for his team, something rarely true of Test cricket where at least two or three batsmen and bowlers are needed to shine in order to win a game spread over three or four innings. Any reduction of time or dilution to that dynamic alters that meritocracy. There should, for the chancer, be no place to hide.

The greysuits say the move to four days, especially as players will then bowl 105 overs a day (who are they kidding), will have a minimal reduction. This will, they insist, bring benefits to scheduling, cost saving and convenience. Broadcasters and host grounds, they claim, are all for it. Except, that they aren’t.

In 2016, MCC produced a paper and unless there has been a glut of mindchanging in the last 12 months, Lord’s is against it, the Oval is against it, Edgbaston is against it and, in a poll conducted by the Professional Cricketers Association, 75 per cent of English professional cricketers are against it. Some of the mighty names on ICC’s cricket committee, Rahul Dravid and Mahela Jayawardene are against it, too. That is not token opposition.

I am not so intransigent to be unable to see some benefits to four-day Tests, such as certainty of scheduling with matches running from Thursday to Sunday, a convention that would help organisers by having the last two days of the match fall on a weekend. There might even be some benefits on the playing side with more sporty pitches being produced, though that is not guaranteed.Yet, do we really want to mess up something with such a long, strong tradition just for the sake of making a neater bundle?

The four-day lobby point also to costs being saved by both the host ground and the broadcasters, who would have one day fewer to pay crew and security staff etc.Yet, that would only be a saving if matches just kept leaking into a fifth day. Otherwise, if most of the fifth day was played ticket receipts for grounds and TV advertising would surely cover those costs. Anyway, broadcasters don’t seem too strapped when it comes to bidding for football, so if their accountants are kicking up about making savings it is only so they can gather together a ‘war chest’ to boost their chances of winning the footie bid.

Tellingly, there are plenty of downsides to moving to four-day matches. Figures have been trotted out showing how Test draws have reduced in recent times, a trend that has been used by both sides to make their case. The figure in the current decade has seen 52 per cent of Tests drawn, down from 77 per cent in the 1980s.

It seems a stark difference until you realise that there were fewer mismatches 30 odd years ago, both home and away, due mainly to there being no weak sides around like Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, the latter now guinea pigs to the reintroduction of four-day Tests with their match against South Africa on Boxing Day later this year. Only those playing West Indies, the 1980s outstanding team, might see a game end before lunch on the fourth day.

Naturally, a reduction in draws must be a good thing, especially when attracting a new audience weaned on binary outcomes of winning or losing. So why risk increasing their frequency by shifting to four days?

In one of the more curious twists of logic, those wanting to increase the appeal of Test matches by shortening the match are doing so by lengthening the playing day. This seems at odds with what most spectators want, the current seven-hour day being enough of a test of stamina without adding a further 60-90 minutes to the mix.

Increasing a day’s play to 105 overs is impractical especially in Asia where early starts are blighted by heavy dew and late finishes made impossible except under lights, a solution I have yet to be persuaded by, pink ball or not. For those who watch, live or on TV, the length of the match is not a problem, but the length of the day is.

Then there are those dirty words to consider, tradition and integrity, something highly unfashionable in this era of fake news and even faker sentiments. I realise I am not the kind of person cricket boards want to attract any more but I have played, covered and watched Test matches since the 1970s, and I cannot countenance a four-day fiasco despite the doom mongers saying that people like me need to wake up and smell the leather.

With T20, we already have the equivalent of World Wrestling Federation

with its desire for mass consumption and its embrace of hype and faux excitement. When the ECB conducted its market survey into T20 back in the early 2000s, it concluded that the format would be a starter pack to grab the attention of the uninitiated who would then progress to watch more complicated forms of the game like Test cricket. It hasn’t happened, though I’d contend that is as much the fault of cricket’s marketing people than Test cricket itself.

Let’s face it, Test cricket has been

In T20 and 50-over cricket, one player can win the game, while in Test cricket at least two or three players are needed to shine in order to force victory

marketed abysmally. Apart from those eye-catching billboards for the 2005 Ashes series, which pre-figured brilliantly the intensity of that series, it has been almost non-existent in what I would call the wider domain. Instead of tinkering, excessively, with Test cricket and threatening its integrity, the greysuits should spend some proper money on marketing the five-day version with verve and imagination.

They might just surprise themselves with the results.