Six days to save the world
As the ICC’s Super Test starts, the consensus in the media seems to be that only a dramatic match is likely to save what, despite the best efforts of the ICC’s marketing men, has generally been a very disappointing couple of weeks.
The Surfer
25-Feb-2013
As the ICC’s Super Test starts, the consensus in the media seems to be that only a dramatic match is likely to save what, despite the best efforts of the ICC’s marketing men, has generally been a very disappointing couple of weeks.
It is summed up in The Guardian, where Gideon Haigh says that Smith has six days to save the world.
What looked such an easy sell on the marketing men's whiteboard now faces a stern six days of interrogation. A fully-fledged Test match that will even count in official records should be a somewhat different matter, but the World XI will have done well if cricket devotees are still talking about the series in a fortnight's time … at least everyone will be relieved when the teams take the field today, for the ratio of press conferences to actual days of cricket is in urgent need of redress.
And in the Caribbean, the Trinidad & Tobago Express follows a similar line:
Rubbished as a bunch of over-paid, under-performing party-goers on an expensive holiday, the long-term viability of the Rest of the World XI and the Super Series are at stake. Officials of the ICC have attempted to put a brave face on the no-contest so far, but will surely be aware that their latest money-spinning concept could die a swift and unlamented death if the Test team, led by Graeme Smith, capitulates in anything like the manner of the disinterested rabble skippered by another South African, Shaun Pollock, in the artificial setting of the Telstra Dome.
But in the Melbourne Age, Peter Roebuck says that the Test won’t be as one-sided as the three ODIs:
Rust, carelessness, and burliness hindered all save the unsung at Telstra's notoriously chilly dome. Most of the visitors had about as much spark as a labrador after a three-course meal … [but] the weaknesses detected in the 50-over side, namely slow running between wickets, lazy fielding and feeble pace bowling, will not matter as much. A powerful batting order will have time to settle with a view to building the sort of innings each has played a dozen times in this company.