It will take more than one exciting Ashes series to save Test cricket
The players love it, and so do the crowds, but the administrators of cricket are blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes
THE series that saved Test cricket.
How many times does that headline have to be rewritten, and what does it say about the perilous health of Test cricket that it needs to be written at all?
No doubt the 2023 Ashes series has been a shot in the arm for the venerable game.
The 2–2 final result — which would have been 3–2 to England had the final two days at Old Trafford not been washed out — was a fitting end to a series that has provided a thrill a minute from the moment Zak Crawley smashed the opening ball of the Edgbaston Test to the cover boundary to the final afternoon collapse by the Aussies at The Oval.
In between we’ve seen some fantastic individual performances — the batting of Ben Stokes at Lord’s, the bowling of Mitchell Starc throughout, Stuart Broad’s heroics on the final afternoon of the series to cap off a magnificent career, Mitch Marsh’s fightback century at Headingley, the stoicism of Usman Khawaja at the top of the Australian order.
Controversy and drama were never far away either, from the stumping of Mark Bairstow at Lord’s to the replacement ball in Australia’s second innings at The Oval.
The packed stands and crowd euphoria at the host grounds, the high TV ratings in Australia and the excited water cooler conversations all add up to the conclusion that this Ashes series was one for the ages.
But how much faith should we put in one successful Ashes series as a barometer for the health of Test cricket around the world?
MUCH of the post-series analysis of the 2023 Ashes will focus on the impact of ‘Bazball’ and the clash of approaches by the hyper-aggressive English and the more restrained Australians.
Bazball has been misunderstood as an entertain-at-all-costs approach, a view that does not do justice to the English. No cricketer worth his salt would put entertainment above winning, but it was clear that after a series of humiliating defeats under the captaincy of Joe Root, England needed a different mindset from the past.
Bazball has been as much about a mental change of attitude by the Poms than a changed physical style of play.
Gone are the dour, self-defeating England teams of the past, characterised by the period when Joe Root and Alastair Cook were touring captains. In their place is a joie de vivre and newly-found self-confidence, perhaps best epitomised by the batting of Harry Brook who lifted his team to victory on his home ground in Leeds in the third Test.
The credit for this has to go primarily to Stokes, who has turned out to be an excellent captain as well as a brilliant cricketer. There has always been more than a bit of the Bothamesque about the way Stokes plays the game (and incidentally, why is it that England has been able to produce a string of generation defining, larger than life all-rounders in the ilk of Botham, Flintoff and Stokes?), but his leadership this series has been a revelation.
After Headingly in 2019, we already knew that Stokes could single-handedly win a match and his players will follow him out of the trenches and over the hill. But he also proved to be a master tactician all series, totally eclipsing Pat Cummins in that regard.
But more than anything, it is the attitude he has brought to the English team that has made the difference: no longer shackled by that steady as she goes, dull as dishwater English attitude, they have made Australia look at times timid and defensive.
I admit I was a sceptic about Bazball, and after England lost their second Test in a row of this series was ready to read it the last rites because I felt it represented the ultimate corruption of the game by T20. At that stage, England’s crazy-brave approach had let them down twice — although both matches had been tight and were anything but walkovers (Stokes’ declaration in Edgbaston may have cost them that match).
But full marks to Stokes and his team for persisting with the positive mindset, and it paid dividends in the end as they were clearly the better side for the last three Tests.
When England was 2–0 down and Stokes declared they could win the series, we all laughed. But they came within a whisker of doing just that. By that stage they had also lost their vice-captain to injury ( but Australia had also lost Nathan Lyon).
In previous years, faced with a 2–0 deficit, England teams would have put up the white flag and meekly surrendered to finish a season without a win.
But enter Mark Wood and Chris Woakes in time for the Third Test, and the England team had a new lease of life. The only reason they cannot have played earlier in the series must have been because of lack of fitness. But what a difference they made.
AND so the 2023 Ashes series will go down in the annals as one of the great series to be played in England, alongside 2005, 1981, 1972 and (for different reasons) 1948.
But did it save Test cricket?
Test cricket is unique. There is no other sport where a match takes five days — 1800 minutes of play — to complete, and can still end without either team emerging as a winner. But the length of a match, which is incomprehensible to people who haven’t grown up with the game, is its greatest strength.
Within a single Test, you can have a microcosm of life itself, as superiority ebbs and flows, the weather changes, the ball gets softer and the pitch starts to crack up. The balance of the game — and the result — can sometimes boil down to a single day, session, over or ball. There are battles within battles.
Unlike the shorter forms of the game, where the ubiquity of matches and series blend into one, no two Test matches are ever the same and that unpredictability is Test cricket’s greatest attraction. A great Test match will be remembered forever; can the same be said about bash and giggle T20? And Test cricket doesn’t need gimmicks like coloured clothing, a white ball, or rock concert atmospherics to be exciting.
Ask any professional cricketer, and they will state their preference for playing Test cricket, not only because of the traditions associated with it but mostly because it is — as the name suggests — a true test of your skill, your tactics, your ability to adapt to conditions, your physical endurance, and your mental toughness.
But at the same time as the eyes of Australian fans were on England, it was barely noticed that the once supreme West Indies failed to qualify for the One Day World Cup. It is nothing short of tragic to see the cricketing powerhouse that produced players of the quality of Sobers, Kanhai, Richards, Lara, Holding, and Ambrose fall so far.
The gap in quality between the big three and the rest is widening. That’s hardly a sign of a healthy Test cricket scene.
And if Test cricket is in such rude health, then why is it that Australia doesn’t have another Test until mid-December and England until late-January?
The answer is money. It’s instructive that even as the English and Australian players were toiling away, across the Atlantic, Major League Cricket was making its debut in Texas.
On one hand, the spread of cricket to the US is something to be celebrated. But is a franchise model operated by a couple of IT tycoons really the future of this great game that has been played at an international level for almost 150 years?
Follow the money, and it doesn’t lead you to Test cricket, just more of this made-for-TV, incessantly repetitive T20.
Outside of the Ashes, Test matches are being played around the world before half-empty stadiums. Teams are being gutted by players chasing big money for T20. The game might be in a financially strong position in India, Australia and England but it is almost on life support elsewhere.
T20 compared to Test cricket is like fast food compared to a gourmet meal. It’s no coincidence that the growing dominance of the cricketing calendar by T20 has been accompanied by increasingly yobbish crowd behaviour, which we saw regularly during the just finished Ashes series.
At the root of cricket’s problems is money, both too much of it in some parts of the world, and not enough of it in others.
The game is increasingly being taken over by corporate interests. Cricket is not unique there, but it sent a shiver down my spine when the chairman of Cricket Australia, Mike Baird, suggested control of the sport could be sold to private equity interests.
Meanwhile, in the poorer parts of the cricket world — most notably the West Indies — the financial incentives to play Test cricket are just not there. Promising players are either lost to other sports, or they jump aboard the merry-go-round that is the IPL and BBL.
It is entirely foreseeable that the bash and run mentality of T20 cricket will eventually mean the loss of the subtle skills required for Test cricket. Already, it is no longer unusual to see a team knock up a score of 300-plus at a rate of five or six an over and lose all 10 wickets in a single day in a Test match.
So it will take more than one Ashes series — no matter how memorable it has been — to save Test cricket. It will require a concerted and focused effort by the authorities to restore it to its pedestal above all other forms of cricket.
But this is the conundrum because if Test cricket is to have a solid future — not just in England and Australia when the Ashes are contested every two years, but around the world — it really needs to be saved from the very same people who are responsible for running the game.
