The strange death of Test match cricket

I want to leave Oliver Chappell and his New Model Army out of this for a second. This isn’t easy to do. Like Devangshu Datta who wrote the last post on this subject, I spend more time than an adult should trying to work out how many Test matches and series this Indian team will have to win to qualify as different or better or unprecedentedly better than Indian teams gone by. I re-read, with a strong feeling of déjà vu, an article I had written in the run up to the last World Cup, that tried to assess the Indian team’s chances in the context of the excitement and anticipation generated by that justly celebrated management firm, Ganguly & Wright. Messrs G & W very nearly pulled it off — and look where it got them: in two years every stakeholder in Indian cricket from the BCCI to Cricinfo had joined forces to nudge Wright into retirement and Ganguly, poor wretch, finds himself cast as Charles I, dethroned, though not yet beheaded.

Are Rahul Dravid and Greg Chappell going to make India a consistently successful team? I’ve no idea. Will they win the World Cup for us in the Caribbean? Who knows. What I do know is that even if they do, the victory will do nothing to change the condition of Indian cricket for the better. If you are worried, as I am, about the health of Test cricket, winning the World Cup might make things worse.

The state of Indian cricket is shaped by the circumstances of international cricket, and, over the last two decades, the financial health of world cricket has become increasingly dependent on the Indian hunger for the game. The critical challenge before both is the secular decline of Test cricket and the likelihood that it will become ever more marginal. As David Runciman wrote in the London Review of Books, the extraordinary Ashes series this summer wasn’t a new dawn, more like a last hurrah. The reason, he explained, was the fact that cricket’s centre of gravity had shifted to the subcontinent where the one-day game was hugely more popular.

I’m not suggesting that the quality of Test cricket has declined. It has never been more competitive or more exciting. Its run-rate is exceptional, the draw nearly extinct. But for the viewing public it is no longer the default form: it’s been replaced by the one-day international. The evidence for the dominance of ODIs is everywhere. One of the most exciting Test series in recent times was the one played out between India and Pakistan in Pakistan. It was a closely fought contest which ended two-one in India’s favour. Nobody came to watch. There were more visiting Indian fans in the terraces than there were natives. India isn’t Pakistan but it isn’t far away. The attendance at the ground or the lack of it isn’t Test cricket’s main problem: the problem is the preferences of cricket’s electronic audience. To adapt the words of an eminent Victorian, a spectre is haunting Test cricket, the spectre of television.

Television has done more to educate and popularize Test cricket than any other force. The nuance and subtlety of Test cricket has become available to all of us thanks to increasing sophistication of television coverage. Not only does the television camera record and relay cricket, it also regulates it through the third umpire. ESPN and Star Sports have treated us to archival footage for which no thanks is enough. But it is also true that all cricket now is paid for by television revenues. And the brute fact is that the world over, but most especially in the subcontinent, there are more eyeballs available for ODIs than there are for Test cricket.

Recently, in the course of a cricket discussion in a television studio, the main cricket producer for a sports channel told me that it was much easier and more profitable to sell commercial time for ODIs than Test matches. He loved Test cricket, but as business, it was a no-contest: one ODI could raise more advertising revenues than whole Test matches. Commercially, money made from ODIs was effectively cross-subsidizing the cost of covering Test Match cricket. During that same show an official from the Delhi cricket association defended his preference for ODIs. It was what the public wanted, he said, and whatever else I thought of his arguments, there was no contradicting that.

ODIs are no longer tacked on to Test match tours. Increasingly India tours and hosts other countries for the sole purpose of playing limited-overs cricket. The current South African tour is a case in point. Players increasingly make their international debuts in ODIs and then leverage their performances in the short version of the game to push their way into Test cricket. Celebrity and the commercial endorsements that accompany it are increasingly the prerogative of those who represent India in ODIs; being in the Test team is an optional extra: Yuvraj Singh and MS Dhoni are outstanding examples of this tendency. VVS Laxman in an instance of the process in reverse: how being dropped from the one-day side can lead to instant eclipse, even for a player of extraordinary gifts who has played one of the greatest Test innings of all time.

When Greg Chappell is asked about his goals for Indian cricket, the first and most important target is the winning of the next World Cup. And India agrees. Runciman is right when he observes that “Most Indian cricket fans would far rather their team win the next World Cup than that they become the number one team in Test cricket. When India beat Australia in their epic three-Test encounter of 2001, the visitors then stayed on for a five-match series of one-day games, which threatened to overshadow what had gone before (especially since India lost 3-2), and gives a good sense of where the Indian administrators’ priorities lie.”

A couple of earlier posts — one by Harsha Bhogle and another by Ashok Malik — suggest that the BCCI, despite its incompetence, its shamateur officials, and its opaqueness could help the cause of Indian cricket by getting out of the way of progress. Progress here is cast in broadly laissez faire terms: the decline of government sinecures, the rise of the call centre worker bee, the new television channels constantly snouting up talent, are together meant to have created a new climate of performance and reward in which the rigorously meritocratic ideas of Chappell & Dravid and the raw talent and total commitment of young provincial players will flourish even without sensible leadership from the BCCI.

This is reasonable — if we’re talking about the health of limited-overs cricket. If cricket is to be left to the logic of the television market, Test cricket’s share of the Indian calendar will dwindle into insignificance. The BCCI in the era of Dalmiya has done everything possible to maximize television revenues by promoting the one-day game at the expense of Test cricket. There have been years when the Indian team has barely played half a dozen Tests. The dodginess of the BCCI’s procedures and its squabbles with television companies shouldn’t obscure the simple truth that the coffers of honorary officialdom and the balance sheets of television companies both stand to gain hugely from the ascendancy of limited-overs cricket.

(The laissez faire thesis is based on an implicit generalization about economic context and sporting performance that might be hard to sustain. We might find ourselves arguing that Wadekar’s great team of the early Seventies owed its success to the dirigiste economic climate created by planning, or that Gavaskar and Viswanath owed their work ethic to the bureaucrats who worked the license raj.)

For Test cricket to survive and prosper, we need an interventionist board that at once harnesses the market and tempers its profit-maximizing logic to create a stable environment for Test cricket. The cricket boards of England and Australia have nurtured the longer game by keeping Test cricket front and centre in their calendars, by doing everything possible to ticket, schedule and market Test matches efficiently, by making sure (in the case of Australia and, till recently, in England) that Tests were telecast free to air so that they reached the largest possible audience. Sustaining Test cricket in India might be harder because ODIs have been such a large part of our television diet but it needs to be done, for reasons that needn’t be detailed to those who love the long game, but for conservation’s sake, for those who don’t. Think of Test cricket as a tropical rain forest that nurtures a diversity of things bred out of the monoculture of one-day cricket.

As cricket’s yellow bible might well have said but didn’t: “For what does it profit a fan to gain the World Cup but suffer the loss of his game’s soul?”