Test cricket boundaries

What could be more quintessentially cricket than the five-day test match?

Test cricket runs the full gamut of the emotions: a gentle and meandering game, sometimes aggressive, brutal and bludgeoning, occasionally boring but often fascinating, a twisting and turning event that appropriately ‘‘tests’’ the patience, skills and tactics of the best cricketers in the world.

How often have we seen a test match that seems to be petering out in a lame and tedious draw suddenly spark up and provide an utterly compelling, edge-of-the-seat thriller in its last hour?

It may be true there are plenty of test matches which do not end in that fashion, but that only improves the piquancy of the knife-edge finishes when they come around on that fifth day.

Shorter formats of the game have flourished in the past few decades, since the introduction of limited-over matches. But for the true aficionado, test cricket and all it holds dear — its history, its characters and legends, its formidable lists of statistics — remains hallowed ground.

But now, due to financial considerations and, as some might have it, the ongoing dumbing-down of our society, international cricket administrators want to permanently whip off the test match bails and put on the covers a day earlier.

What's that you say? Four-day tests? That's simply not, err, cricket.

Having tests of just four days in length could remove the intellectual complexity of making a sporting declaration on day four or five and the excitement of chasing it down — though given the Black Caps performances across the Tasman in recent weeks, maybe the fewer the days of play, the better.

Unfortunately, the harsh winds of commerce are whistling around the stands and threatening test cricket. The world's apparent impatience with anything that fails to provide instant gratification or an immediate result means something as stately and considered as a five-day test now finds itself on a sticky wicket.

Test matches have not always been five-day affairs. Since the first was played — between England and Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in March 1877 — there have been periods of time when tests only lasted at most three or four days, and some have even been timeless tests.

As the Sydney Morning Herald said this week, the current five-day test is the result of ‘‘142 years of trial and error’’ in producing a match with a good enough proportion of wins and losses. Introducing four-day tests would merely reward teams which cannot win, or do not want to chance their arm, by making draws more likely.

The International Cricket Council's cricket committee is meeting this year to formally discuss moving to mandatory four-day tests from 2023.

New Zealand Cricket chief executive David White has expressed careful support for the proposal of Thursday to Sunday test matches, saying widespread consultation will be essential first. His counterparts at Cricket Australia and the England and Wales Cricket Board are also supportive.

Which puts the bosses a million miles away from many top current and former players, who have already loudly slated the idea, wanting it buried somewhere under the turf in the vicinity of third man.

Mr White told Radio Sport having four-day tests ‘‘frees up the calendar a bit’’, which was ‘‘very congested with ICC events, the World Test Championship and other bilateral cricket’’.

‘‘It's very important that all the stakeholders work closely, and that's the administrators, the countries, the players and the commercial partners and the broadcasters to work out what the best model is for cricket.’’

So, in other words, money is clearly a driving force behind the proposal. But where are the cricket fans in Mr White's list? Surely their views are just as important?

There are plenty of bad cricket puns you can come up with to describe the idea and the thinking of the game's administrators, but at this stage it would appear they should be out, hit wicket.

Why not move the bosses on to four-day weeks instead and leave test cricket alone?

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