Test cricket, at five days the longest format in any team sport, is often regarded as an endangered species. Scarcely a month goes by without some new manifesto that seeks to save Test cricket, whether day-night Tests or a world championship. Such proposals rest on the idea that Tests are an anachronism in a world of short attention spans and instant gratifications. The assumption is that the greatest threat to Tests comes from the appeal of franchise-based Twenty-20 cricket.
Yet in the right circumstances, Test cricket has shown that it could not merely endure but actually thrive. In England – the country that invented T20, in 2003 – Tests against major nations are often sell-outs, and crowds are much larger than in the 1980s and 1990s, despite tickets costing around £60 per day. BBC Test Match Special, an anachronistic format on an anachronistic medium (radio), continues to attract a large audience. In this context, the poor attendance for the England-Sri Lanka Tests last month, and the surprising number of empty seats for last week’s England-India game at Nottingham are especially worrying. These declining attendances suggest that the greatest threat to Test cricket today comes not from T20 but from the dull, attritional cricket that is the result of dead pitches.
In recent years, Test pitches around the world have become depressingly similar. Where pitches in England, South Africa and New Zealand were known to encourage seam movement, and those in West Indies and Australia feared for their pace and bounce, the average Test pitch, no matter where the match is being played, is now slow with low bounce, and changes little in character during the five days. Nowhere is this truer than in the West Indies, where on pitches that once favoured fast bowling, the ball now rarely bounces above stump height.
Pitch preparation is an inexact science and little is known, for instance, about the impact of climate change on the character of pitches. But it is possible to identify several reasons why dead pitches are becoming so common. In England, as George Dobell of Cricinfo has written, pitches have become more batting-friendly partly as an unintended consequence of improved drainage systems designed to reduce the amount of play lost to rain. Pitches thus now retain less moisture, leading to less bounce and seam movement.
In India, by contrast, slow turning pitches are the preference of captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The curator of a major Test venue in India told me, off the record, that in recent years his instructions have been to prepare a pitch slow enough to nullify opposing fast bowlers, but with enough turn to ensure that India takes 20 wickets. This strategy has been successful. India have only lost one series at home under Dhoni, and that too because the opposition, England, had better spinners. It has led, though, to some of the most soporific cricket ever witnessed on Indian soil, and spectators are increasingly disenchanted. Nagpur’s expensive new VCA stadium has swanky facilities but a slow, flat playing surface, and Tests there are played to a near-empty house.
The primary motivation behind the preparation of slow pitches is commercial. Both television revenues and gate receipts are dependent upon maximizing the amount of play. Across the world, administrators are desperate to avoid Tests that end in three or four days. But as the Indian example shows, in the long run, this strategy is likely to be counterproductive in commercial as well as cricketing terms. The vast majority of spectators prefer a four-day finish that features lively and attacking cricket to a match where each innings produces 500 runs.
The uniformity of slow Test pitches threatens to destroy three features that make Tests so uniquely compelling and memorable, and justify the name “Test”: the challenge posed by new and unfamiliar conditions; the balance between bat and ball; and genuinely hostile fast bowling. In these ways, they are turning Tests into a slower version of one-day or T20 cricket, which is bat-dominated and played on flat tracks. In the 2000s, the influence of limited-overs cricket made Tests much more exciting, with the inventive strokeplay and athletic fielding that characterise the shorter forms enriching the five-day version. But dead wickets discourage attacking play and reduce Test cricket to a mind-numbing game of pure endurance. Robin Williams once described cricket as “baseball on Valium”: Test cricket is increasingly becoming limited-overs cricket on Valium.
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Yet in the right circumstances, Test cricket has shown that it could not merely endure but actually thrive. In England – the country that invented T20, in 2003 – Tests against major nations are often sell-outs, and crowds are much larger than in the 1980s and 1990s, despite tickets costing around £60 per day. BBC Test Match Special, an anachronistic format on an anachronistic medium (radio), continues to attract a large audience. In this context, the poor attendance for the England-Sri Lanka Tests last month, and the surprising number of empty seats for last week’s England-India game at Nottingham are especially worrying. These declining attendances suggest that the greatest threat to Test cricket today comes not from T20 but from the dull, attritional cricket that is the result of dead pitches.
In recent years, Test pitches around the world have become depressingly similar. Where pitches in England, South Africa and New Zealand were known to encourage seam movement, and those in West Indies and Australia feared for their pace and bounce, the average Test pitch, no matter where the match is being played, is now slow with low bounce, and changes little in character during the five days. Nowhere is this truer than in the West Indies, where on pitches that once favoured fast bowling, the ball now rarely bounces above stump height.
Pitch preparation is an inexact science and little is known, for instance, about the impact of climate change on the character of pitches. But it is possible to identify several reasons why dead pitches are becoming so common. In England, as George Dobell of Cricinfo has written, pitches have become more batting-friendly partly as an unintended consequence of improved drainage systems designed to reduce the amount of play lost to rain. Pitches thus now retain less moisture, leading to less bounce and seam movement.
In India, by contrast, slow turning pitches are the preference of captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The curator of a major Test venue in India told me, off the record, that in recent years his instructions have been to prepare a pitch slow enough to nullify opposing fast bowlers, but with enough turn to ensure that India takes 20 wickets. This strategy has been successful. India have only lost one series at home under Dhoni, and that too because the opposition, England, had better spinners. It has led, though, to some of the most soporific cricket ever witnessed on Indian soil, and spectators are increasingly disenchanted. Nagpur’s expensive new VCA stadium has swanky facilities but a slow, flat playing surface, and Tests there are played to a near-empty house.
The primary motivation behind the preparation of slow pitches is commercial. Both television revenues and gate receipts are dependent upon maximizing the amount of play. Across the world, administrators are desperate to avoid Tests that end in three or four days. But as the Indian example shows, in the long run, this strategy is likely to be counterproductive in commercial as well as cricketing terms. The vast majority of spectators prefer a four-day finish that features lively and attacking cricket to a match where each innings produces 500 runs.
The uniformity of slow Test pitches threatens to destroy three features that make Tests so uniquely compelling and memorable, and justify the name “Test”: the challenge posed by new and unfamiliar conditions; the balance between bat and ball; and genuinely hostile fast bowling. In these ways, they are turning Tests into a slower version of one-day or T20 cricket, which is bat-dominated and played on flat tracks. In the 2000s, the influence of limited-overs cricket made Tests much more exciting, with the inventive strokeplay and athletic fielding that characterise the shorter forms enriching the five-day version. But dead wickets discourage attacking play and reduce Test cricket to a mind-numbing game of pure endurance. Robin Williams once described cricket as “baseball on Valium”: Test cricket is increasingly becoming limited-overs cricket on Valium.
