Testing times for the long game of cricket

Ashes aside, interest in Test cricket is at an all-time low, putting new World Championships in doubt, writes Stephen Brenkley

A supporter of South Africa holds a placard supporting Jacques Kallis during the fifth day of the second and final Test match between South Africa and India. They were among the few supporters who turned up (GETTY IMAGES)

Watching the cricket in Australia these past two months it has been easy to think that all is right with the world. Forget, if it is possible without taking a memory loss drug, the desultory performances of England against rejuvenated opponents. All that is merely the cyclical frippery of sport.

Australians will insist that they have had more of the cycle than the poms in the last 140-odd years but that is Australians for you. England have had their moments. This one-sided Ashes series has been enacted before full houses and the papers, the TV channels, the radio stations, the websites and the social networks have been fuller of it still.

It has been wonderful in its way. It has been as though Test cricket remains a significant feature of the common round, recreationally, socially, culturally, even economically. Unfortunately, this series and the one before it in England have hidden a deeper truth.

The Ashes have been operating in a parallel universe. In the universe alongside where every other country plays the game, Test cricket is in danger of becoming an irrelevance and a minor inconvenience. “Good lord, is that stuff still going on?” Virtually nobody watches it live, except in England and Australia, and if that continues it will be increasingly difficult to keep playing it.

The ICC, while insisting that they are protecting the long game as their most precious commodity, have instigated a World Test Championship. The competition, intended to feature the top ranked teams in a format of two semi-finals and a final, is scheduled to take place in England in 2017 and in India in 2021.

There is an increasing feeling that it will not proceed. England are continuing to plan for it but behind the scenes it is possible to sense that the appetite for it among administrators is not shared by broadcasters whose involvement is vital. If they do not pay, it will not go ahead.

Geoff Allardice, the Australian who is the ICC’s cricket general manager, is optimistic that there will be takers when the ICC goes to market this year with the eight year package of cricket tournaments to run from 2016 until 2023.

“There will be three events in a four year cycle, a World Twenty20, the Cricket World Cup and the World Test Championship. The WTC is a different commercial proposition from the CWC and the World Twenty20 and I think what we want to do is create a pinnacle event for the Test format. It may not necessarily be maximising the revenues but it is the right mix of events for the next four year cycle and it respects all three formats of the game.”

Two defects loom which could terminate the WTC before it starts. The first is that while in principle the ICC have taken the decision not to maximise revenues broadcasters may be so loathe to pay for the WTC that it becomes economically unviable. The second is that no suitable format for the tournament has yet been worked out and what to do in the event of an honourable draw may be beyond reasonable arranging.

A third drawback is the faint but worrying prospect that England, if they continue to show the sort of form they have in Australia, would plunge so far down the rankings that they may not qualify for their own tournament. If Australia win the final Test in Sydney, England would slip to 107 points in fourth place, barely a nose in front of Pakistan. It would make the tournament impossible to stage.

Test cricket remains the greatest of all games but poor marketing, crammed scheduling and playing it as an afterthought have hindered it grievously. Not to mention the burgeoning worry that modern generation of players have been brought up to see T20 as not only integral but where the money lies. Look no further than another series which has overlapped with this one.

There was a justified worry that this second Ashes rubber of the year, driven by commercialism first and a long-term restructuring of the schedule second, would be too much. Its history and traditions have sustained it and modern players who may well never have heard of Harold Larwood or Bill Woodfull have eagerly grasped it.

But despite the evidence of last year you cannot play the Ashes every other week. Nor has it seemed to matter a jot that this has been a contest between the third and fifth ranked nations in the ICC table. Across oceans, a two match series between the first and second placed teams has been taking place.

It consisted of only two matches and was gripping. South Africa, having fought grimly for a draw in the opening match, won the second after stellar exhibitions by Jacques Kallis, in his last Test match, and Dale Steyn, the world’s best fast bowler.

From start to finish it was fascinating. But after a flurry of interest at Durban on Boxing Day few attended.

In Johannesburg where the home side finished eight runs short of a famous victory with three wickets left on the final evening, the total attendance over the five days was barely more than 20,000. It was not helped by the city’s middle class seasonal exit to the coast but it was still poor considering that these were the best teams around.

In Durban around 14000 turned up on Boxing Day but this tailed off dramatically to less than half of that on the following days. And this is with South Africa at the summit.

They have the world’s best team with some players who would grace any age but Test cricket as a live event seems to be passing the country by.

Nor would it have been any different in India and pro rata it may have been worse. The country is still in thrall to cricket but it is Twenty20 in general and the Indian Premier League in particular that it now loves above all others. The IPL pays the piper even there, everything else is lip service.

But the inherent weakness of the series in South Africa was not that it was poorly watched (the counter argument to that is always that plenty of people are watching it on television, though far more watch limited overs games). Perversely, it was that there were not enough games.

When Australia toured South Africa in 2011 they played two Tests and on hearing about this, Steyn remarked: “I go on holiday for longer than this series is going to last.” He might have reprised it for the recent series against India.

The fundamental reason for it being so short was that India refused to play more. What India wants to do, India does. There were plenty of reasons, including the playing of nondescript, almost exhibition series against West Indies at home to accommodate Sachin Tendulkar’s 200th and last Test and the loathing of the Board of Control for Cricket in India for Haroon Lorgat, now the chief executive of Cricket South Africa but previously chief executive of the ICC when he made decision and formulated policy which was not all to India’s liking. It was payback time.

To hear the ICC talk as collective body, it is as if they are well aware of their role as guardians of the game. A rigorously researched and written recent book, Saving The Test, by Mike Jakeman, a journalist with the Economist Intelligence Unit, is pessimistic about Test cricket because it is being squeezed.

Among his suggestions to do what his title says are to make sure more countries not fewer are playing the game. That is to ensure the big countries play the small ones, otherwise the latter will never improve.

Another is to increase the allure of the game through a globalised digital rights market. He suggests that the selling of digital rights for the benefit of all could do two things: equalise finances by collectively selling them from the ICC centre and dramatically increase the allure of Tests by the interaction that would be possible in terms of watching the game how you want to watch it and having instant access to camera angles, slow motions and stats. (Of course, the same could apply to the other forms of the game which might be self-defeating).

It would be inaccurate to say that this is a golden age for Test cricket. Too many incontrovertibly great players have retired in the past 10 years for that to be so and the standard of cricket is not always of the highest.

The grouping at the top, however, is close. The gap between the top four or five nations has narrowed in a way that was not the case in most of the preceding 30 years, when one team, West Indies and then Australia, were masters of all they surveyed.

The ICC’s full members – the ten Test playing nations – promised recently to play a minimum of four Test matches each a year in a four year cycle. The ICC are somehow billing this is saving the game.

Allardice said: “I don’t think the countries were necessarily going to target that as the number of matches they wanted to play but it was a minimum all countries were prepared to observe. With Test cricket and international cricket generally some series and some matches are commercially very valuable and other series aren’t at the moment.

“I think there is that reality but continuing to play a lot of cricket that is loss making will eventually lead to trouble and financial issues for different countries.

“Every country is trying to do its best to promote the game, some countries have more resources to do that and that’s as much challenge about the game and drawing fans to Test cricket and the actual marketing techniques used. There is a balance between what is a minimum amount to maintain your performance as a Test team but also balanced with the commercial reality of running a business as a home board needs to do.”

There is the rub. They will not play because nobody pays to watch, nobody pays to watch because they are not playing. Test cricket may not perish but it is seriously imperilled and soon there may only the Ashes to play for.