The eternal lure of Tests

“The English are not a very spiritual people,” said Bernard Shaw, “so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.” Shaw had Test cricket, rather than modern short-form versions of the game, in mind when he said this. Sport as religious rite. “Cricket is a process, not a sport; seepage rather than drama; a summer’s dawdle akin to picnic or garden party,” wrote the English novelist Paul West, attempting to explain cricket to Americans. He was not being entirely fair: Test cricket can contain high drama, its intensity often magnified by the torpor which precedes it. But he has a point: lunch and tea are key rituals, and a sport that is suspended when light drizzle falls will always have its detractors. Groucho Marx was one. After spending a day at Lord’s with two Observer journalists in 1954, he declared cricket “a wonderful cure for insomnia”.

England and India are presently engaged in an absorbing five-match Test series. England won the first Test with some infallible batting by Ollie Pope and a remarkable performance by young left-arm spinner Tom Hartley, who took nine wickets on his debut. England’s trio of youthful spinners also did well in the second Test, which finished earlier today/yesterday, but a sublime double-century by India’s new batting sensation, Yashasvi Jaiswal, and irresistible bowling by Jasprit Bumrah ensured that the home side levelled the series. It is the perfect advertisement for Test cricket, so often written off as something that might have appealed to sports fans in the early Palaeozoic. But the message is likely to be missed because the games are being shown on TNT Sports, a cable channel with limited viewership, and radio rights are held by TalkSport rather than the BBC’s Test Match Special, traditional home of cricket. Aficionados can follow online, but then it becomes a largely statistical exercise. Seeing is believing.

There is a paradox. Test cricket is generally recognised as the supreme form of the game, the ultimate “test”, yet its future is forever in doubt. South Africa have taken a substandard team to play a Test series in New Zealand because its best players are being deployed in domestic Twenty20 “franchise” cricket. The result – a hopelessly one-sided “contest”. Series are now truncated: the five-match India-England epic is a rarity; the recently concluded two-match series between Australia and West Indies, which conjured up a new superstar in fast bowler Shamar Joseph, is more representative of the modern way, preferring short story to novel and eschewing true narrative drive. Sri Lanka and Afghanistan have just played a one-off Test, but no one except avid collectors of Wisden and the odd resident of Colombo is likely to have been aware of it.

Test cricket is a luxury in a world preoccupied by brevity and instant resolution, and people (TV executives especially) are suspicious of a game that can last 30 hours and still end in a draw. Try explaining that to an American! No wonder they swapped cricket for baseball soon after the civil war. Can Tests survive? Traditionalists hope so. “You can’t be in England and not know the Test score!” exclaims dyspeptic cricket obsessive Charters incredulously in Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady Vanishes. Poor Charters would be in a permanent state of apoplexy at the indifference and neglect now threatening his beloved game. As for his views on Bazball…

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