This week saw the culmination of Allen Stanford’s super-series. The billionaire has been pumping money into the dying beast of Caribbean cricket for years, and he stepped up this year by offering $20 million in a winner-takes-all, three hour extravaganza between the English team and the Stanford Superstars, a team of West Indians whose reputations by and large ill-fitted their billing.
I was not the only one who thought this affair a little tawdry. The England team were uneasy about the whole thing, as were the hitherto blindly loyal Barmy Army, who declined to support their team en masse. Stanford’s aim was to get American audiences into cricket, (the game was broadcast live on ESPN), a demographic of sports fans generally used to baseball as the longest possible sport, weighing in at around four hours per game.
A Test confrontation lasts as long as the players are mentally strong enough to make it last, and an individual battle lasts as long as those involved can stay out there.
There will be no having a breather when the ball is up the other end. There are few honourable draws as the final whistle blows; one of you needs to submit. Limited-overs cricket cannot match this. It is no epic victory for a bowler when he dismisses someone who just walked across his stumps and swung and missed in an effort for quick runs. In Tests, your only imperative is to survive as long as possible. And a battle for survival for survival’s sake is far more compelling than for the crude sake of a few runs. Tests are the purest test of your cricketing skill. That’s probably how they came to be so called. The contest ends when you are not good enough to continue.
I watch a hell of a lot of sport, to the chagrin of my family, and my tutors, and I can think of few sports that afford such an intense raw conflict as a Test Match. Tennis matches, come close, and like anyone who saw it, I was gripped by Federer-Nadal at Wimbledon this year, but cricket’s real hook is the asymmetry between the competitors. Federer-Nadal was great, but they were for long stretches merely negating each other by both, to be crude, hitting a ball hard at each other. Batsmen, are, obviously, not bowlers, and the skill-sets demanded of each are totally different. The mutual incomprehension between great bowlers and batters is what makes the contests great.
Contrast cricket’s great confrontations. We all have our favourites. My personal one is Atherton-Donald in the Nottingham Test in 1998. Both had a match to win. The only way Donald knew how was to run in and bowl extremely quickly, and he must have wondered how Atherton could stand up to him, and why he would even want to. Both subsequently admitted in their autobiographies thereafter that for that hour on the fourth day, neither of them were truly thinking about the match, but about beating each other. There was time for winning matches tomorrow, but just then, it was just them. Nobody who has seen it ever forgets it, and nobody who only ever watches limited overs cricket will ever see anything like it. And that would be a tragedy.
Cricket is far from physical. Having played a lot of cricket, I’ve found it is actually pretty difficult to get genuinely tired whilst playing, even if the next day your body screams at you. It is small bursts of energy, expended frequently. In that way, it is less demanding than, say football. You can’t make Torres play five days in a row, because he’ll die. Anything good he is going to do, he’ll do it in the ninety minutes, and the nature of football is such that even in his best game, there will still be less time spent watching him than watching other people. Footballers’ great deeds are a flash of lightning in a 90 minute stargaze.
Cricket manifests brilliance in a different way. At its best, it gives an opportunity to watch sustained brilliance for hours on end. It isn’t that Shane Warne bowled the odd stunning ball which made everyone gasp. We gasped again and again. The point is even more acute for batsmen. It is a skill that shouldn’t be forced or rushed. Asked what the greatest innings they have seen are, I know of few cricket fans who talk of Jayasuriya running wild in one-day games, even if he was a sight to behold at his best. Far more often, Lara’s 153 at Bridgetown comes up, an innings set against the backdrop of three days of intense cricket, not just three hours. I don’t really remember great one-day innings I have seen, especially from 20/20 games. More than anything else, swinging with your head in the air and connecting is partly dumb luck, even if, as Gary Player says, the more you practice, the luckier you get.
Limited-overs cricket has its place. It does bring in much needed revenue, and generate new interest in the game. But it should still only be a support act for the Platonic form of cricket, Test matches. An American associate of mine who only last year started liking cricket, at my bidding, got into Test matches first. When he watched his first 20/20, he said to me “it’s a little bit pornographic, don’t you agree?” Porn has its place, and Plato’s Republic has its place. That one is more immediately gratifying than the other is no reason to abandon it.
CHERWELL’S TOP 5 TEST MOMENTS:
1. England vs Australia 2005: one of the greatest Test series in the last 50 years. Workplace productivity plummets as Cricinfo traffic soars. A silly-haired South African becomes a Great British hero
2. Donald vs Atherton 1998: Chasing 147, Atherton gloves a bouncer from Donald but is given not out. Donald goes berserk and fires down the most hostile hour of bowling ever seen. Atherton gets bruised, battered, shouted at, but doesn’t blink.
3. Brian Lara vs Australia 1999: His unbetaen 153 at Bridgetown reminded everyone why the term ‘god-like’ had ever been applied to Lara. Scoring just under half the team’s runs, he led the Windies to their 4th innings target of 311, with just one wicket to spare.
4. India vs Australia 2001: A spellbinding 2nd Test saw India win after following-on and posting an epic 657 in the second innings, with Laxman’s finest ever innings producing 281 of the most elegant runs Kolkata is ever likely to see. An exhausted Australia then succumbed to Harbhajan, sending 1 billion Indians into raptures.
5. Anil Kumble vs Pakistan 1999: Kumble, looking to go home early, bowls 26 overs of vicious legspin, taking all ten wickets, and putting himself up with Jim Laker as only the second man to so utterly dominate a Test match batting line-up.
