Test Cricket Is Forever

It better be, for no business that takes its core customers for granted can survive long. If Tests go, cricket dies.

It better be, for no business that takes its core customers for granted can survive long. If Tests go, cricket dies.

Dear Lalit,

As the commissioner and chairman of the Indian Premier League (IPL), you create history as often as Sachin Tendulkar scores an international hundred. I know you’ll love me for saying this. If Kerry Packer was an agent of change, you are the closest thing to Kalki for the game of cricket. Pajama cricket’s creator was a futurist, you are the future itself.

Astride the blemishless white steed named IPL, you are the sport’s destroyer of darkness, annihilator of ignorance, purveyor of pint-sized pleasures, terminator of Test match tedium. When you speak your lispy words, the world listens, and then repeats toad-like. Earlier this month, with your trademark timing and unerring shot selection, you chose as your messenger, a Left-leaning British daily to make your latest prophecy: ‘Whether we like it or not, broadcasting determines whether a game survives. Without broadcasters, you don’t have money to pay players or keep the sport alive… All I am trying to do is remind people that we live in a modern age and Test cricket has a big problem: it is played in the daytime when most people are working.’ You said this with a sense of fake foreboding that scarcely covered your glee. As if on cue, millions of Indians cottoned on to the idea. High on IPL ecstasy, SMS polls wrote off Test cricket.

‘T20 will soon become the dominant format—without doubt,’ you added. You’re off to a fine start, Lalit—one that would have made Hobbs and Sutcliffe shudder in envy. With each passing day an increasing number of Indians wonder if it’s the beginning of the end for Test cricket. Your efforts to build a strong, logically and commercially persuasive case for IPL and T20 cricket has resulted in several unexpected positives. ‘Efficient Markets Hypothesis’ and ‘laissez faire’ are no longer words we encounter in the thicket of pink papers. SuperFreakonomics is now a must read for sports writers. Today, to be able to say you are a Test match fan requires the kind of courage that was needed a decade ago to articulate an alternate sexual preference. This, surely, is a ‘Citi moment of success’, for you personally, and for the ever burgeoning tribe of free market fundamentalists in India.

But at the cost of sounding blasphemous, let me assure you, in less than a decade after you’d have asphyxiated Test cricket, locking it up in a basement, there won’t be anything left to sell—TV rights, advertising inventory, franchises, players or replica jerseys. The game would have been poached to extinction. You’ll probably still have a cigarette business to run, and people like me would be forced to take our children to a £100 tour of the Lord’s Museum for a glimpse of our misspent youth.

But hey, Lalit, take it easy. I’m not here to scare the living daylights out of the IPL secretariat. I’ll tell you why, despite your business acumen, the T20 game can’t kill off a 133-year-old tradition. Read on, you’ll probably finish it inbetween a ‘Maxx Mobile strategic time-out’.

Some years before you conceived a way to auction cricketers like cattle at the Pushkar fair, and unleashed the full force of Resurgent India on the world of cricket, it was possible for the average cricket fan in India to enjoy innocent pleasures, and yet feel special.

In January 1999, over the course of four days of a Test match at Chennai’s MA Chidambaram Stadium, I was witness to cricketing history. And on the final day, I, along with 20,000 others, was helping make some. Pakistan was in India for a full-fledged tour after almost a decade. The first Test scheduled in Delhi was relocated to Chennai in a fortuitous turn of events as lumpen right-wingers dug up the Ferozeshah Kotla pitch (God bless the saffron sainiks). Watching Waqar Younis’ slick 30 yard run-up, and a leapless burst at the bowling crease in the fading light of the first day, more than made up for the strip search the police subjected you to and the over-priced staphylococcus flavoured sambar-rice sold inside the stadium.

Sachin Tendulkar scored a duck in the first innings, and almost found redemption with what to date remains his best knock, battling back spasms and Chennai’s humidity that’s made worse by the accompanying acid breeze of Buckingham Canal. Perhaps the lack of oxygen in that stinking concrete coliseum made him attempt a lofted drive over cover, with only 17 more required for victory, only to be caught by Wasim Akram. That moment of submission to the elements and physical pain probably still haunts him after 7,000 more runs and 29 centuries. Akram himself produced a spell that packed more balls-of-the-century than Shane Warne’s entire career (if you don’t believe me, ask Rahul Dravid); iffy umpiring decisions hurt India; and Shahid Afridi waltzed his way to a hundred.

India lost. Then, in a moment of unexplainable generosity, the crowd (tears rolled down most cheeks) accorded a bunch of Pakistanis—which included in its ranks Javed Miandad, the coach, and Salim Malik—an unprecedented standing ovation, earning Chennai’s cricket watchers such exaggerated epithets as India’s most ‘sporting’ and ‘knowledgeable’ audience.

Indeed, it had been a contest of epic proportions. That match to me still represents Test cricket’s cosmic vastness of plan. Maybe I was of an impressionable age, watching from the aisles my childhood heroes in action. Ten years on, I’m still replaying that match in a corner of my mind. On the other hand, in 2008, I was there at the DY Patil Stadium for the final of the inaugural IPL season. I remember Nita Ambani and her children getting off the chopper, Warne lifting the trophy, and precious little of the game itself. Maybe, Lalit, that’s the way you want things to be.

The fact that Test match attendance in India is declining is incontestable. It’s due to a combination of administrator apathy, mindless scheduling (Nagpur’s ultramodern stadium is a good 20 km away from the city centre with little public transport connectivity), some diabolically docile pitches that produce run-fests for the record books, and yes, our increasingly hectic work lives. However, even if a growing number of people watch the T20 variety, Test matches have a subliminal effect on us. Performances in the Test arena help people form a lasting, defining opinion of players, teams, captains and nations, in all forms of the game. To understand what I mean, you don’t have to look beyond Virender Sehwag. He is currently cricket’s most precious commodity, as precious as Sir Garry Sobers was in his day. For cricket, he’s the equivalent of Lionel Messi and Wayne Rooney rolled into one. His popularity is such that an Australian has even founded a religion called Sehwagology under the Nawab of Najafgarh’s godhead. He is what he is because he can almost score a triple hundred in a single day of a Test match, because oppositions no longer feel secure against Sehwag even with second innings leads in excess of 400. All that’s despite a very mediocre T20 and ODI career. Thankfully, even now the ultimate goal for any young professional cricketer still remains earning a Test cap. And there hopefully will remain some things that money can’t buy. Just think of the baggy green cap, and why Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke don’t play T20.

You know it better than I do that all sports need enduring yet evolving scripts. Only when two nations compete at the very highest level for the most prized honours do you get these scripts. We wouldn’t remember and continue to debate Maradona’s Hand-of-God goal if that hadn’t happened at a World Cup. In the 1990 Fifa WC, Roger Milla-led Cameroon defeating holders Argentina opened up for us the charming and skillful world of African football, complete with a post-colonial subtext. Similarly, Test cricket is the game’s ultimate script factory that generates enough raw material for ODIs and T20 to feed off. The intensity of India-Australia rivalry in recent years is a direct result of Tendulkar’s heroic performances in 1998 and Warne’s effusive praise for him, and that VVS Laxman series in 2001 when India stalled the rampant Ashwamedha horse of the unchallenged Aussies at the ‘Final Frontier’.

Like The Mahabharat, just look at the sub-scripts and new heroes it gave birth to: Ganguly, the fearless leader who gave his arrogant counterpart as good as he got; Harbhajan the turbanator, Laxman the follow-on phoenix, and Matthew Hayden who made a spectacular return to top-class cricket in his new muscular avatar as the ‘Haydox’ and never ever went out of form till the day he retired. In IPL 1, Slapgate was so lame and its lead actors Harbhajan and a sobbing Sreesanth so shallow, that they could barely pull off a couple of episodes, let alone an entire season. Can the hurly burly of T20 ever produce a tale of physical bravery and grit to match that of Anil Kumble sending down 14 consecutive overs with a broken jaw pieced together with nothing more than a cotton bandage? Just as all our mythological heroes possessed mastery over a particular weapon of their choice, their cricketing equivalents too were blessed with special attributes. David Gower’s strokes were silken and divine, Viv Richards wrecked oppositions with his trademark swagger, and Imran Khan’s leadership skills were legendary. Suck this stream of scripts dry at your own peril.

Please don’t get me wrong. I love cricket in any form. IPL adds some much-needed variety to the anaemic after-hours entertainment options for urban families. Unlike fundamentalists on the other side of the fence, I wouldn’t say that T20 requires very little skill. The quality of all-round ability on display at the 2007 T20 WC semifinal between India and Australia was a first rate advertisement for the game, not just for the fastest version. The switch hit, dilscoop and upper cuts are exciting additions to a batsman’s vocabulary. But Lalit, do you realise that with more than 90 matches next year, IPL will further cheapen the thrills that are already commoditised low-hanging fruit? As I write, more than 500 ‘DLF maximums’ have been hit. Having exhausted their bank of superlatives by match day 10, commentators hail any hit that crosses the already shortened boundary even by a millimetre as a ‘massive’ hit. Given the volume of matches, every third game is a last-over nail-biter. How many last ball ‘humdingers’ can we handle? And I’m not even getting into the subject of cheerleaders.

You know what, Lalit, no business in the world that has taken for granted its core customers in the quest for expanding the market overnight has ever succeeded. It’s always the business that suffers, not the consumer.

Yours truly

PS: The day I find a book inspired by T20 better than CLR James’ Beyond A Boundary, I would concede that Test cricket has outlived its utility.

TR Vivek is co-author of the book Cricket and Commerce: IPL an Inside Story.

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