It's Test cricket but not as yer know it (5 July 1999)

5 July 1999

It's Test cricket but not as yer know it

Giles Smith

Inspired, almost certainly, by the recently concluded World Cup, England and New Zealand devoted much energy last week to perfecting a new, intense and supremely television-friendly version of cricket: the one-day Test.

They didn't quite pull it off, somehow losing focus a little and eventually allowing the match to drift on for two and a half of the allotted five days.

But these are early days and by the end of the series, who knows, these two gifted teams could be wrapping up the whole thing by tea on the Thursday. No more tedious Saturday afternoons, then, and no more patchy Mondays. Say what you like, it's a way forward.

It's possible that Channel 4 will be less supportive of this exciting new initiative, having recently written a large cheque for Test cricket on the assumption that it would furnish many hours of broadcasting over the next few years, rather than the odd 40 minutes here and there. Already the title of the channel's nightly highlights programme, Today At The Test, looks to be in trouble and may have to be adapted in the future to This Morning At The Test or, more simply, Today's Test.

Still, while it survives, the first thing to say about Today At The Test (which made its debut from Edgbaston last week; the full-on, Channel 4 live cricket experience begins with the Lord's Test) is that, at 7.40pm, it's positioned at a time in the evening when people might actually watch it - a fairly simple broadcasting notion, though one the BBC never really seemed to get the hang of.

Somehow the Corporation formed the opinion that cricket fans were the same people who watch re-runs of Prisoner, Cell Block H and/or study for Open University degrees - people whose needs would happily be met by an 11.50pm start. Which may have been true in a lot of cases, but many will be grateful to Channel 4 for taking a broader view.

The programme was broadcast from an entirely conventional, pitch-side commentary booth - assuaging at a stroke the fears of those who thought the channel's project to youth-ify cricket would oblige them to present the sport live from the dance floor at the Ministry of Sound, with Pete Tong spinning records in the background.

The format didn't crack any moulds, either. A special guest and a member of the commentary team joined Mark Nicholas in picking over the day's play. Again, people's worst fears have not materialised: thus far the special guest has not been a former weather-girl with her own chatshow on Channel 5, nor a deeply unfunny London pub comedian with a regular gig on a quiz about Seventies television.

Rather, we've had players who have taken some part in the day's action and thus might reasonably be expected to have something straightforwardly illuminating to say about it. Even if they're Phil Tufnell, or "Tuffers", as Mark Nicholas prefers to call him.

Tuffers says "yer know" a lot. In fact, Tuffers says "yer know" for England. On Thursday, settling down straight away, he managed nine "yer knows" in his first two answers and 13 by the completion of the opening session. At tea, Tuffers had moved on to an astonishing 25 "yer knows". The final session was a less busy and more frustrating one for him, but by close of play, Tuffers was 26 "yer knows" not out - a stalwart performance which will have done his average for the season no harm whatsoever.

The graphics - again, with no noticeable ingratiating nod towards the teen market - are clear and pleasing in pastel shades of Andrex. And as for studio gimmickry, the much-remarked "Snickometer" had a quiet debut. On Friday, in a programme notable for the moment that Richie Benaud described a lame shot as "a real windy woof" (an expression which only he could get away with), Nicholas further introduced "The Danger Zone", a device by which the path of the ball towards the stumps could be analysed by freezing the image and rendering the batsman see-through. This would have been more impressive if the batsmen hadn't been doing such a good job of that themselves.

There are no plans yet that we know of to feature England and New Zealand in an edition of Clash of the Titans. A second series of these hugely engaging documentaries on major sporting face-offs opened on BBC2 last night with a portrait of that particularly bitter 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island when an American side, pumped full of post-Gulf War patriotism, decided to leave no butt unkicked in their fight to take back the trophy from the Europeans.

Even Dave Stockton, the American captain, had to admit now that the team hats he commissioned in khaki camouflage were a touch de trop. And the "Wake the Enemy" phone calls placed to the Europeans in their hotel rooms at 5.0am were perhaps not in the purest spirit of sporting engagement. But what's to be expected from a competition with only honour at stake and no prize money? Clearly, when you remove the incentive of financial gain from sport, all sorts of truly base motives emerge.

Source :: The Electronic Telegraph