A Day in the Life of Test Cricket

What would it take to salvage Test cricket, to capture and preserve its value?

Gideon Haigh

Test cricket is world sport’s comeback kid.  No game is so routinely written off; no game so regularly defies its obituarists.  Those who’ve kept the faith will feel twice vindicated by 28 January 2024, which saw success for two away teams against the world’s two strongest teams by narrow but somehow also convincing margins.  It was spin to win in one, pace like fire in the other, and cricket of sometimes astonishing skill: ten years ago, that audacious ramp of Steve Smith's and the reverse dexterity of Ollie Pope would have been unthinkable.  But it also called forth some old-fashioned qualities - of endurance, of courage, of leadership - of the kind that can only emerge and be appreciated over the long haul.  And the players themselves loved it.  The magnanimous Indian congratulations for Pope, Pat Cummins’ confession that defeat by West Indies moved him ‘as a fan’ - these showed Test cricket at its generous, all-encompassing, all-involving best.

For their four days, the Gabba and Hyderabad Tests shadowed one another like different novels in a similar genre, unfolding to introduce new characters and reintroduce old ones, expose protagonists to adversity and offer them redemption.  On the first day in Hyderabad, Pope fell limply and Tom Hartley was pongoed mercilessly.  On the last they combined electrically, first with the bat then in the field.  In some ways it was what transpired between times and out of sight that really mattered - the interior monologues, the rejuvenating cameraderie that kept them up in the fight.  Ben Stokes’ team measures up in this respect exceptionally: it collects and carries and cares for its casualties.  It nurtured Zak Crawley for two years; it persevered with Jack Leach through multiple maulings.  Ten years ago, a diffident opening spell ended Simon Kerrigan’s career almost before it began; Hartley, who in his unsmiling way has the melancholy of a war poet, was given every chance to fight back.

This, of course, we knew of England.  But the West Indies?  In Adelaide, you heard the sadness in the voices of Brian Lara and Ian Bishop as they called the latest instalment in the cricket decline of their countrymen.  Now, as Lara and Bishop once did, Shamar Joseph shook the Australians to their core.  The modern game often seems grooved in the late 130s, early 140s, reliably reproduced, readily dealt with.  Now here was Joseph in the upper reaches of the 140s and it looked a different game.  Such differentials in speed shouldn’t make a difference but they do.  Batters come down late.  Defences look suddenly permeable.  Forward presses are endangered by the bounce.  Hooks and pulls are harder to control.  And so the Australian order yielded like a door under a battering.

In fact, the world’s number one Test team has passed 400 only once since Lord’s; their bowlers have again and again been called on to keep totals within bounds.  Now they had to see Australia through with the bat as well, and fell short.  Had Mitchell Starc’s yorker hit Joseph’s left foot rather than his right, I doubt he’d have bowled; as it is, he reprised the old joke about Fred Titmus: what has two toes and spins?  For Shamar Joseph to bowl like the wind, nine toes suffice.

So again, we see Test cricket for what it is: still the most reliable form of the game for the exhibition of all skills, the expression of character and the manufacture of memories.  So why is it always seen as in its winding sheet?  Given that it’s always capital in whose name the case for its obsolescence is always being made, perhaps we should ask it for an answer.  What would it take to salvage Test cricket, to capture and preserve its value?  $300 million?  $500 million?  Large sums, for sure, but cricket has access to them; in Indian Premier League terms, they are chump change.  What’s lacking is the will and the imagination to break the mind-forged manacles of ‘the market’.  Administrators with their heads up the arse of private equity are always ignoring that there’s actually already a ton of money in the game.  What’s at issue is its distribution, and the covetousness of those protecting their respective piles.  Should Test cricket perish, it will not be from singular failure of the format but from collective failure of imagination.