Shaking the patriarch
A news item on the Cricinfo website suggests that the International Cricket Council (ICC) is considering ways to repackage Test cricket in a format that will "make it more exciting and introduce an element of competition".
The report quoted I.S. Bindra, a former BCCI [Board of Control for Cricket in India] president and the ICC's main advisor, as saying that the ICC has been discussing "ways to increase scoring-rates [and] have a world championship of Test cricket". The discussions were triggered by concern over diminishing attendance at Test matches, which has been accompanied by rapidly escalating interest in Twenty20 games.
The one-day format in the middle may also be jeopardised by the popularity of the three- to four-hour long 20-over games that bring unprecedented non-stop entertainment.
Ever since One-Day matches entered the international fixtures, there have been debates about their impact on the five-day versions. Purists growled that it was not cricket and was actually damaging the capacity of players to build innings and remain focused over the longer period.
Others argued that there was room for both formats, and the shorter version encouraged greater audiences, enabling more people to see a match from start to finish.
It makes one wonder whether One-Day matches evolved because Test attendance had already begun to show signs of decreasing, whether people had already begun to lose interest in the slower, more cerebral form of the game before One-Dayers emerged – or whether it is because of 50-over matches that Test cricket is losing its following.
Test cricket has been around for more than a century, enough time to give it an imperturbable air that suggests it cannot be removed from its place as the patriarch of the game. Yet it might not be so unthinkable after all for Tests to become an endangered species. The pace of our times may actually be squeezing it out of existence.
The wide disparity in attendance figures at Tests, One-dayers and Twenty20 matches hosted in the West Indies alone tell a compelling story. Not even the current series against Australia has pulled in crowds, and this must be worrying for all those territories that have poured considerable funds into Test grounds.
Worse, with each series hardly stretching past three Tests, there are fewer matches to spread out among more grounds.
It is exacerbated by the other two formats of the game, moreso by the excitement generated within the Twenty20 orbit. In an insightful commentary on the recent IPL tournament, Rahul Bhattacharya assessed its impact in India, where it torpedoed every other pastime, but found that "the cricket itself was both dazzling and monotonous, a bit like video-game cricket, which works as condemnation as well as, in the playstation era, high praise".
"The best games had a kind of compressed intensity where each delivery held the weight of an entire match. The vigour with which players of all ages and colours roused themselves was a revelation to those who thought only the national flag could stir such passion."
He found it too early to tell where it will go, but cited Bindra, described as an influential member of the IPL governing council, saying that "the grand vision is to move cricket to the next level, and get each league in the each country to resemble the English Premier League with an exciting mix of international and national players".
After measuring up the factors, Bhattacharya concluded: "It is hard to envisage international Test cricket retaining primacy in such a scenario."
Is Test cricket entering its dotage and will it be retired in our lifetimes? Or will One-Day matches face the axe? Is there room for all three versions? And will leagues rather than nations be represented in the ultimate arena?
It is quite a plateful to digest as we look to the third Test, which has its own story to tell.
* This column is republished with permission from the Barbados Nation, where it first appeared.