Make cricket a real test
Stuart Hess says to attract viewers Test cricket needs to be a better spectacle. It has to be more competitive.
|||I’m not sure I’m in favour of Day/Night Tests. Certainly not in South Africa – yet.
I’m not that old-fashioned that I don’t see the need for cricket to move with the times – especially the five-day format, which if we, who do love that form of the game, have to admit, is quite boring.
Test cricket needs to move with the times, like everything else. In the 21st century life moves quite quickly. One day you’re learning email, the next you’re on Facebook, then it’s Twitter and before you know it the things people like about what you tweet gets highlighted by a heart.
Test cricket is almost 138 years old. Whereas Test cricket was once the be-all and end-all of the sport, that has now changed. The 21st century and the numerous distractions therein make Test cricket appear laboured even if by almost all experts’ accounts the game nowadays is more attractive than it’s ever been.
Cricket is now all colourful, hard-hitting, flash-bang, T20 Ramming and Slamming. Trying to fit Test cricket into this new age is hard. Just look at the crowds that have been watching the Pakistan and England series in the UAE. Or even this morning in Mohali where India and South Africa started a Test match.
Test cricket doesn’t fit in with people’s schedules these days hence the call for D/N Tests, the first of which will be played this month between Australia and New Zealand in Adelaide.
The big problem is the ball. It’s pink and it’s awful in that it loses it’s colour far too quickly to make for a reasonably even contest between bat and ball. ‘Stuff it,’ some might say ‘batsmen have had it their way for too long.’ The trouble is in Australia apparently the fielders are having trouble tracking it, and that is very dangerous indeed.
But that is a practical problem. Given science these days, you’d expert some hotshot to design a ball that maintains its colour for longer. Test cricket’s biggest problem is the standard of the competition.
Right now, four sides could be said to be genuinely competitive – New Zealand, Australia, England and of course South Africa, the latter having not lost a Test series away from home in nine years.
To attract viewers Test cricket needs to be a better spectacle. It has to be more competitive.
These days, for the most part, it is not. If the product is still dull, you can have all the pink balls, D/N cricket, flame throwers and magicians you want – no one will watch it.
Make the sport more competitive first.
Then we can talk about what kind of ball is being used.