One or two younger TV viewers may have had a bit of a shock when Sky put a Test match and an IPL game on adjacent channels on Bank Holiday Monday. Press the wrong button and instead of getting a proper game of cricket, you ended up with players wearing white clothing in strange fielding formations (three slips and a gully) and batsmen not only not attempting to hit every ball for six, but quite often not attempting to hit the ball at all.
Press the other button, and there were not only sixes flying out of the side of the TV set, but the commentators were in such an advanced state of delirium that had it been taking place in a zoo then the head keeper would have been summoned to administer a couple of shots from a tranquiliser gun.
No prizes for guessing the match with the higher viewing figures. Test cricket is slowly having the life squeezed out of it by the giant boa constrictor known as T20. To the point where it’s hard not to forsee a future in which the oldest form of the game will be, at best, relegated to an inconvenient sideshow, with only the likes of the Ashes retaining any appeal for television and sponsors.
Scarcely a week goes by without some new proposal being mooted to save Test cricket, and the latest one comes from Brian Lara. Abolish the draw says Brian, regurgitating the old chestnut about Americans being unable to understand how you can play anything for five days without someone winning and someone losing.
Quite what the Yanks have got to do with it I’m not sure, especially when they can make a one hour game of gridiron football last for what seems like several months, and Lara’s recipe also fails to include any details of how this new look drawless Test scene would work. Although he does say, helpfully, that it would be “worth taking a look at”.
Lara also appears to have forgotten that modern Test matches rarely finish in draws anyway, or that watching a side scrapping to avoid a final-day defeat has provided some of cricket’s great spectacles. Anderson and Panesar improbably hanging on for 69 balls in the first Ashes Test in Cardiff in 2009, being just one example.
At present, most of the save Test cricket eggs appear to be in the day-night basket, with Edgbaston hosting England’s first ever evening game against the West Indies this summer. It’s certainly worth a try, although one possible drawback in trying to attract a post-work audience is whether the rush hour traffic will leave enough time to get home from the office and change into a banana.
My own view, though, is that Test cricket’s eventual saviour will be T20 itself, which is essentially a game with no sub-plots, and none of the gladiatorial duelling which made confrontations such as Atherton versus Donald, and Boycott versus Holding, so compelling.
Already the sporting equivalent of Groundhog Day, T20 may eventually become so boring that even Sky’s IPL commentary team might decide that the sight of a white cricket ball being mis-hit over an artificially short boundary is not sufficient to justify a decibel level that prompts the dog to start howling at the telly.
At the moment though – judging from my own experience of channel hopping from Rising Pune Supergiant versus Gujarat Lions to West Indies versus Pakistan on Bank Holiday Monday – nothing that happens in an IPL game, including a legside wide or a batsman calling for fresh gloves, can prevent Danny Morrison or Mel Jones from making it sound as though it is the single most amazing thing they’ve ever witnessed.
Jones has a voice you could grate cheese with, and while you can’t see her eyes, you figure they must be permanently on stilts. And she gave a passable impersonation of a teenage girl at a 1960s Beatles concert when Ben Stokes and MS Dhoni were at the crease together, two cricketers whose wages for a few weeks’ work are £1.7 and £1.5 million respectively.
The breathless activity only ceased for something called the Ceat Strategic Time Out, giving me the chance to flick over to the other channel, where Azhar Ali and Ahmed Shehzad were blocking away for Pakistan, and making me wonder how much these boys were on. About the same as the Rising Pune Supergiant’s tea lady most probably.
Switching back to India again, the home team with the peculiar name required 60 runs off the last five overs, and Mel set the scene by giving the viewers a revved up preview of Andrew Marr on General Election Night. “We’ve got a huge poll here!” yelled Mel. “Will Dhoni and Stokes get RPS home?”
We could scarcely wait for the answer, and Mel supplied it. “Sounds such a simple question” she blathered. “But is it a simple answer?” At which point a graphic came up to reveal the result of a viewers’ poll, accompanied by Mel yelling:“yes it is! 71 per cent says ‘yes’!”.
Briefly wondering whether the “Ask The Audience” element was taking T20 ever closer to a game show than a game of cricket, I flicked channels again, and managed to lower my soaring levels of blood pressure by watching an over of Test match cricket containing four balls the batsman didn’t have to play, a no ball, a forward defensive, and a drive to mid-off which barely reached the fielder.
I did, though, get back to Pune just in time to see Stokes’ century confirm the viewers’ poll, and hear Mel describe the closing scenes. “The crowd has gone absolutely ballistic!” she cried, not appearing to realise that the crowd hadn’t gone half as ballistic as she had. Before adding, by way of giving the spectators her own personal endorsement for going ballistic, “and so they should!”
Meantime, back in Barbados, the crowd was not going ballistic. Mostly because there wasn’t actually a crowd. But watching the two games has given me a far better idea than Lara’s. What Test cricket should be doing is taking a leaf out of the IPL’s book by giving everyone a fancy name and getting the punters more involved.
I can see Mel going ballistic now. “Will Rising West Indies Supergiant get a leg bye in the first over after lunch? The crowd (camera pans to a bloke sitting all by himself at the Joel Garner End) says: yes!!!” The more you think about it, it’s got to be a winner.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, May 5 2017
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