Are we losing our love for Test cricket?

I only got to watch small passages of play of the recent Lord's Test. Watching gripping Test cricket after a surfeit of T20 was great fun, and at some point during the post-tea session on the first day, I realised one of the things I had missed during the IPL was the sun. Something about the golden slant of the late-afternoon light enhances the aesthetics of watching cricket and accentuates a sense of background pause.

Cover drives seem to unfurl a second slower, outswing hangs in the air a little more. The pause allows for a bit of reflection, conferring on every piece of cricketing action a singular value, without interrupting the flow of match play. Every ball, and its associated batting and fielding move, seems suspended on its own thread, persistent in memory, while adding to the overall narrative of the game.

Apart from its obvious bias in favour of batsmen, a relative lack of cricketing continuity, and its corollary, a Teflon-like quality when it comes to memories (very rarely does anything about a T20 stick to your mind, even through the duration of an over), both admittedly subjective parameters, are what I find jarring about T20. The only thing I seem to remember from eight seasons of the IPL is AB de Villiers v Dale Steyn from last year, and an Ishant Sharma spell in Kochi from 2011.

A bowling spell generally needs to be around five overs long for it to have lasting impact on viewers. The sense of anticipation to do with the knowledge that a wicket or more might fall during the spell focuses your attention on each ball. The Test cricket follower has learnt to wait patiently through a seemingly luckless spell of bowling till a wicket falls at its fag end; he or she has also been witness to brilliant wicketless spells and appreciates them for what they are, separate from the immediate result. Similarly, runless spells have been endured, knowing a counter-attack might be lurking around the corner. The key, though, is that all this has to be experienced, and in a sense, most viewing of sport is a throwback to childhood, a revisiting of the ebb and flow of familiar emotion.

This is where I wonder what will happen to the current generation of cricket viewers, who have seen T20 before they have had the chance to watch a Test match in full. And, like it or not, there's a huge percentage of cricket watchers who belong to this category. Very few youngsters (certainly in India) these days follow and keep track of Test cricket, and fewer still read reports of play to immerse themselves again in the events of the previous day. Reduced attention spans are considered a sign of the times, and it is generally held that Test cricket viewership in stadiums across the world was on the way down before the advent of T20 in any case, but I can't help think that T20 has accelerated the slide in the case of today's schoolkids.

I happened to watch a recent IPL game featuring Mumbai Indians in the company of a youngster of around 12. It was great to see her interested in the game. She knew Mitch McClenaghan was from New Zealand, having watched bits and pieces of the World Cup. De Villiers was batting and she was cheering the fours and sixes - besides which there was little else. As much as I was enthused about T20 getting young people who might not have otherwise followed the game to actually watch it, I couldn't get myself to deny that the format seems to have dulled the sense of anticipation associated with longer-drawn-out events.

Cricketing continuity is among the biggest casualties of T20 cricket. A bowling spell generally lasts a couple of overs, often just one. Bowling rhythm is almost non-existent. Fours and sixes when they become mind-numbingly common are almost devoid of context, and do not serve to glue together a narrative.

To be fair, for the players themselves, playing in 20-over competitions is probably never any less exciting than playing in 45-50 over games. The focus is on a different range of skill sets, but the thrill of playing the game is no less in the shortened form. There will always be players who are suited more to one format or the other. It is also the case that the serious budding player at junior levels follows Test cricket quite closely even today. But my concern is more to do with the viewer who is not a frequent player - a category that makes up a large part of cricket's audience.

Before T20 and before the IPL, kids in India watched and followed Test cricket fairly closely. Perhaps they weren't at the grounds so much, but they tracked the game on television or on the web. This following has dwindled rapidly. The televising of other sport, and a rapid increase in the fan following for the English Premier League and Formula One, are generally quoted as signs of changing viewership patterns in sport, but surely there's more to it than that. T20 has fit nicely into the night-time outdoor entertainment slot, and the marketing hoopla surrounding the format has succeeded in coaxing kids into believing that anything slower is boring.

I recall talking to the proprietor of a small corner shop outside Lord's 15 or so years back. He struck a wistful note, saying kids in England didn't play cricket like it was in their blood, as they did in India. Luckily many kids still do that in India, but the type of cricket the schoolgoing kid who doesn't play grade / club / schools cricket follows has changed dramatically. Unless administrators in India think on their feet, and start scheduling Tests around school holidays, and have events planned around Test matches, or offer free student days - as they do with some degree of success in Australia, for instance - current and future generations of Indian cricket viewers might completely lose out on watching Test cricket and we may have a sharp, long-lasting generational divide in the game's viewership.

We are already beginning to wonder, to paraphrase the great CLR James a bit clumsily: what do they know of cricket who only T20 know? Surely something can still be done to stop things from coming to a permanent pass, when this thought might ring even truer than it does now.