The ManicaPost
On the point with Aubrey Kamba
CRICKET is one of the few sports that have managed to evolve from how it is played to how it is governed globally.
The past couple of years saw the emergence of T20 cricket which has filled stadiums with people and pockets with money. This has seen a drastic change in the number of people who follow Test cricket. Grounds are no longer being filled to the brims unless if it is one of those historical matches like the Ashes or the Sri Lanka vs India matches.
From Test cricket, all the other forms of the game, change is again knocking on the door of this beautiful game. To Test cricket again, then, and a conversation almost as old the game itself: the state it’s in, what’s gone wrong, and how to fix it.
Only two decades after the very first Test, newspapers were already publishing leaders on the health of the sport and letters recommending remedies.
In the 1890s, the hot topic seems to have been what The Times described as “a preponderance of batting” causing too many draws, which were, in turn, putting spectators off the game.
“Under its present conditions,” Wisden noted in 1900, cricket “is in the very direst peril of degenerating from the finest of all summer games into an exhibition of dullness and weariness.”
Mooted solutions included abolishing boundaries, bringing in a fourth stump, and narrowing the bat. In the Times, one correspondent proposed doing away with draws altogether, with the team that scored the most runs-per-wicket being the winner.
Thirty years later, “dull cricket” was once again the great complaint. In the Daily Telegraph, a suggestion that “an extra be added to the total for every ball scored off, and one deducted for every ball not scored off”.
Wisden wanted to tinker with the lbw law, bring in bigger stumps, and ban grounds men from using liquid manure. A decade later the Telegraph was it again.
First, matches should begin on Sundays; second, “batsmen’s average scoring speeds should be published”; and third, cricket should think about bringing in promotion and relegation.
So it goes, on and on, through the 1960s — limit them to one ball an innings suggested Jim Swanton; bring in a 65-over limit on the innings, argued Ossie Wheatley; drop Ken Barrington, demanded one Ida Jamieson — and beyond.
The arguments may have had a different substance, but always a similar tenor: the game is in peril, something must be done.
Point being, it sometimes feels like part of the appeal of Test cricket lies in grumbling that it’s not what it once was, that our discussions about how to improve it are as much a part of following the sport as our speculation about what the captain should do at the toss or whether the bowler needs a short leg.
As Woody Allen put it: “I am always certain that I’ve come down with something life threatening.” Allen rejected the idea that he was a hypochondriac, insisting he was, instead, an alarmist.
“There is a fundamental difference. I don’t experience imaginary maladies – my maladies are real.
What distinguishes my hysteria is that at the appearance of the mildest symptom, let’s say chapped lips, I instantly leap to the conclusion that the chapped lips indicate a brain tumour.”
And as Jarrod Kimber wrote in his Test Cricket: The Unauthorized Biography, Test cricket can seem like the “Woody Allen of sports, permanently on the couch, analysing itself”.
• This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email.
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