PUT TO THE TEST

Gideon Haigh on series 3 of The Test

Artwork by Fisher Classics

Cricket Australia incurred two risks when five years ago they commissioned of The Test, a documentary co-production about life on the road with the national cricket team. The first was that such a series might reveal something unexpected, unattractive or even untoward about the subject; the second risk was that it wouldn’t. Who knew what a peep through the keyhole into the Aussie dressing room might reveal? But it needed to be something tasty, maybe even a little salty, to make the effort of compromising the environment worthwhile.

The first eight-episode series, released in 2020, benefited ironically from the generally poor odor in which the Aussies, under captain Tim Paine and coach Justin Langer, languished at the time. The worst had already been revealed. The team had been caught cheating, or, at least, planning and/or attempting to cheat. So there was something disarming about finding that team members were really rather everyday, knockabout blokes, some of them really rather pleasant - which is faithful to my impression, by the way, from watching the Australians over the same period. Disclaimer: Pete Lalor and I have been part of the Greek chorus providing narrative touches in all three series since.

The subtitle of the first series of The Test was ‘A New Era for the Australian cricket team’. This was both a statement of fact, that Paine and Langer represented a significant change of management, and an assertion of purpose, that the decision to go into partnership with Amazon formed part of a rebranding that put Newlands 2018 behind both team and organisation. There was general consent to the latter. The players, we learned, were consumers of other fly-on-the-wall shows about sporting franchises - a genre dating back to Hard Knocks, the long-running series about the Baltimore Ravens, and then being recalibrated by the likes of All or Nothing: Manchester City and F1: Drive to Survive. They were keen to be better understood by the public, with the implication that they felt harshly judged.

Their instincts were sound: it is far harder to dislike something seen only from the outside. To be welcomed in is to be implicated, maybe even seduced. I know of no cricketer who on watching The Test hasn’t nourished the thought: why, they’re just like my club/my team/me, happy in success, demoralised by failure, united by a common cause. That applies no less in the third series: to see the conga line of well-wishers to Usman Khawaja after his hundred at Edgbaston, Marnus Labuschagne rue his dismissal at Headingley, even just Travis Head putting on his pads at the Oval, is to marvel at the ordinariness of it all. The distance between observed and observer is collapsed.

The third series benefits also from the excellence and eventfulness of the cricket in which Australia was involved during the program’s making. The 2023 Ashes was, of course, fantastic, and those passages filmed from ground level look all the more so: whether it’s Mark Wood’s speed or Mitchell Marsh’s power, everything looks epic and impactful. You saw Wood bowl Khawaja at Headingley, yes? Believe me, you haven’t seen it until The Test.

There are moments when it almost seems a little uncomfortable - and is all the better for it. When Pat Cummins is consoling Todd Murphy about his omission ahead of Old Trafford, we must cock our ear to hear the faint audio, as though we’re eavesdropping. When we’re taken behind the scenes of Nathan Lyon’s battles at Lord’s, weeping when he’s injured in the field, descending the stairs one at a time when he bats, it feels almost voyeuristic. The players come well through their ordeals there; the scenes at The Oval around the change of ball in Australia’s second innings seem to me to cut both ways. Aye, the ball did behave differently to the ball it replaced; Australia, equally, had two set batters on a flat pitch. Whether out of fatigue, panic or sense of persecution, Cummins’s team failed to ride out something that should not have bothered them nearly so much.

Anyway, all of this is very interesting, yet I also can’t escape the sensation with The Test that diminishing returns are settling in. The pressures on Pat Cummins’ team in this series are almost entirely external. They respond cohesively in a way that is a credit to them personally and a bit underwhelming telegenically. Maybe Tolstoy’s remark about happy and unhappy families applies equally to sporting teams: the happy ones are all the same; it’s the unhappy ones that are different.

There was no second series of Making Their Mark, the AFL’s 2021 co-production with Amazon. Perhaps it was felt it had said what it had to say; will that become true of The Test also?

The scenes best remembered and most replayed from series one are those suggesting that Paine’s men and coach Langer were at cross purposes. This may have been overstated, yet in some ways it foretold the breakdown in their relations - Langer’s resignation as coach in January 2022 has served subtly since to attest The Test’s authenticity. Now, however, there is a sense in which we’ve seen this before, and in specific instances we have: for example, we played out the Mitchell-Marsh-is-a-great-bloke-just-harshly-judged scenario in series one; we do more or less the same in series three. Which is not to quarrel with the concept. Marsh is a great bloke, and a more interesting cricketer than meets the eye. Even his nickname is, by modern standards, pretty original, ‘Bison’ being proverbially something Aussies wash their hands in. But this is low-hanging fruit. The effect is banal because the more revealing aspects of Marsh’s personality do not surrender themselves readily to a camera.

From the three series, moreover, there has been a by now conspicuous absence. Had The Test been filmed in the decade to 2018, I dare say that the most conspicuously garrulous character would have been David Warner, who for better and worse personified Australian cricket through that period. In the fifteen episodes of The Test, he has barely featured. His place came under threat during the 2023 Ashes as never before, but you would not know it: a few handshakes and one chagrined post-dismissal clip are more or less the sum of him. Similarly absent, for reasons of innate self-effacement, is Langer’s successor Andrew McDonald. Not that I’m expecting Graham Taylor in The Impossible Job (1994), John Sitton in Leyton Orient: Yours for a Fiver (1995), or even Langer in series one, but the absence of the coach now leaves an uncomfortable hole in the narrative. Don’t mistake me: this is thoroughly watchable television, to a formula as smooth as Cummins’ chin. But if The Test is to retain our interest on an on-going basis, it needs to take a few chances, to put itself to the test.

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