Test cricket strikes again

It's a strange but significant phenomenon that Test cricket chooses the time when its obituaries are being certainly prepared to confirm the values that have kept it going for 133 years. It was said to be suffering from a serious bout of slow play and boredom at the end of the 1960s. Its future seemed in jeopardy. Then along came two exhilarating series, both involving the West Indies, to shake it back to life - in Australia, with its tied Test, in 1960-61 and in England in 1963.

When Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket introduced night cricket, coloured gear and white balls at the end of the next decade, its chief executive, one Lynton Taylor, predicted Test cricket would be dead within 10 years, killed off by the popular one-day version.

As crowds flocked to 50-50 matches under lights, it was a theme given credence in Australia for some time. Now the traditional game is again under threat from the arrival of an even shorter, trendier and more lucrative byproduct. Even many of those to whom it remains paramount fear that, this time, Tests won't survive.

Two matches on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean last week tempered the pessimism, They typified what sets Test cricket apart, as others have done in the past year, in the Caribbean and in England.

In Sydney, Australia transformed a first-innings deficit of 204 and a seemingly hopeless second-innings position into remarkable victory, or more to the point, Pakistan did by buckling to the gradually mounting pressure. In Cape Town, an England last man nicknamed 'Bunny' held on for 11 balls to deny South Africa a victory that would have been theirs had they taken a wicket off the last 2.5 overs.

The images of assorted faces in the crowd, from wizened old men to pretty young things, revealed an extended tension not possible in the razzmatazz of the other genres of the game. It was an identical replay of what the same No.11, Graham Onions, had done in the first Test in South Africa a few weeks earlier, of how last pair James Anderson and Monty Panesar defied Australia in Cardiff in July and what another 'bunny: Fidel Edwards twice did to England in the Caribbean last March, with help first from Daren Powell, then Denesh Ramdin.

For all the pulsating, crowd-pleasing action they generate, such fluctations are beyond one-innings matches that remain limited in more than just the number of overs available.

Sydney and Cape Town were examples of what has sustained Test cricket in its original form for so long. In both matches, there was no winner, except the game itself.