How to innovate Test cricket out of existence
Empty stands, defensive tactics, too many draws - the series in India has not been what Test cricket required after a year in which Twenty20 has taken the game by storm
Brydon Coverdale
25-Feb-2013
Empty stands, defensive tactics, too many draws - the series in India has not been what Test cricket required after a year in which Twenty20 has taken the game by storm. Robert Craddock in the Daily Telegraph paints a grim picture.
This is a heartbreaking sentence to write but it is the inescapable truth - Test cricket is in big trouble. Series between Australia and India are traditionally a magnificent pep pill for the game, providing storylines that stimulate the cricket world.
Test cricket needed that to continue this series but instead we got a batch of grim arm-wrestles on featureless wickets before poor crowds, enhancing the suspicion that Test cricket is in decline. After 131 years she is a robust old thing and won't die overnight - she might not even die at all. But she will be systematically downgraded by a thousand small cuts and it's started already.
After witnessing the tiny crowds in Nagpur, Simon Barnes wonders in the Times whether the pursuit of excellence is a legitimate reason to run a professional sport.
Most players are agreed that the complexity and infinite variability of Test-match cricket make it the highest form of the game. It's just that fewer spectators are interested in the higher form of the game, at least as a paying spectacle. The primacy of Test cricket is being maintained, but it is for reasons other than spectacle or money.
In the Australian, Malcolm Conn describes the play on the third day in Nagpur as "diabolical", and lays the blame largely with Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
It seems that the bright new boy of Indian cricket, the face on every billboard who has energised and enlivened a nation with his brilliant batting and captaincy in the short forms of the game, is happy to lead Test cricket back into the dark ages. Australia complacently followed. The local media described Australia as defensive and Dhoni's tactics innovative. If that's the case he may well innovate Test cricket out of existence.
Jon Pierik, writing in the Herald Sun points out that the BCCI must take responsibility for the empty stands in Nagpur.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India should hang its head in shame for the farcical situation in which spectators at this match are only allowed in if they have a five-day pass. That's right, no single-day tickets are sold. What a joke.
Also read Phil Long in the BBC's Test Match Special blog.
... the decision not to let supporters drink water and eat the food they've purchased at the food stands in their seats is taking things a bit too far!
It did mean though that the quieter passages of play were enlivened by the surreptitious smuggling and consumption of food and water into Gallery S-I by the most unlikely of 'criminals'!
Brydon Coverdale is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo. He tweets here