Why Test Cricket is The Perfect Antidote to the Age of Instant Gratification

One Monday morning recently, my laptop, showing tangibly human properties, decided that this was one Monday morning too much.
It didn’t so much dig in its heels as go on all out strike at 10am.
I didn’t want to judge it too harshly — I didn’t feel too dissimilar myself — but it did have an impact on my overall productivity for the day.
A couple of hours of calls and emails is about all I can manage on a smartphone, so at around lunchtime — there’s only so many thumb swipes and small-screen glare before one’s brain needs some light relief — I caved in.
I could have reached for a book or a notebook, but suddenly I remembered the cricket. It was the final day of the Third Test between England and South Africa.
The dawning of this realisation, and my revealing of it here, might lead you to the conclusion that you are reading the words of an inveterate bore. Someone who enjoys sitting around all day to the soundtrack of willow against leather and the upper-class-laddish pronouncements of Henry “Blowers” Blofeld, the Old Etonian messing of David Gower or the proud Yorkshire-isms of David Lloyd (or Bumble as us inveterate bores might call him).

That conclusion, though, might be wide of the mark.
Some very quick background, if it doesn’t bore you.
I haven’t watched more than a few minutes of Test cricket in more than 20 years. This distance has been brought about by the combination of the game’s steady-then-all-at-once move to Sky TV and the gnawing feeling that spending an entire Thursday, say, in front of the TV was neither a noble nor productive use of time by any young adult male intent on making the most out of life.
But my adolescence! It coincided with that glorious period between the advent of live sport to television and its onward journey onto pay-TV, which has, in money’s ultimate paradox, made everything better at the same time as it made everything worse.
I was a fortunate teen. Whereas many of my contemporaries were engaged in some sort of physical activity — golf, for example, if they had a few quid in their household; a summer job if they had not (entrepreneurial spirit was not exactly frowned upon in early 1990s rural Ireland, but there just wasn’t very much of it to be seen) — my default preference was for indoors living in the height of summer.
For company I had a cast of characters who I came to know and love.
I watched every minute of the whole event as Mike Powell broke Bob Beamon’s 23-year-old world record in the long jump at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo. I remember the power and outrageously perfect timing of Jan Eriksson’s headers for Sweden in the 1992 European Football Championship, a turgid enough tournament I nevertheless greatly enjoyed not in spite of but because of the absence of Ireland. (After the mad bandwagoning of Euro 88 and Italia 90, when Con Houlihan, the sportswriter, remarked that “I missed the World Cup — I was in Italy at the time”, ’92 was blissful. Again,I had sport almost to myself.)
And always there was music. Luciano Pavarotti sang Nessun Dorma and Freddie Mercury sang Barcelona and there were three lions on the shirt and Jules Rimet was gleaming and my Dad looked at my in bewilderment when I knew, at one particularly niche table quiz, who was the composer of the theme music of the BBC’s coverage of the 1998 World Cup.
(It was Fauré. Classical music has, for me, always been framed in the context of sport. I resented a sports-hating, Classics-reading cousin who pronounced that Pavarotti “farts orally”. I remember my surprise, years later, when I discovered that Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s Rugby World Cup theme song World in Union was words placed over the music of Gustav Holst.)
By the mid-1990s, the arrival of Sky Sports News and its brand of 24-hour breathlessness was still some time away. Cricket was still, gloriously, on the telly all summer.

There were many young Irish men and women who would gladly have watched two flies on a wall but for whom cricket was still several steps too far. The thoughts of games that could last several days and still not produce a winner sounded not so much strange as positively anachronistic; it was in some ways the sporting equivalent of a bow and arrow when most of us were hooked on Streetfighter II on the SNES.
(The Super Nintendo did add some enjoyment. After joysticking to top gear around the long straights of Hockenheim watching Formula 1 became all the more enjoyable, until Ayrton Senna, an idol to every young man discovering a yearning for cars and girls, crashed into a wall at Monza and showed us that there was a big difference between computers and life.)
But still, in spite of its innate slowness, cricket was a source of endless drama and tension.
I remember well the shock and awe of a 22-year-old Shane Warne’s first ball in Test cricket in England, when he spun it miles to take the wicket of Mike Gatting.
But that — an explosive moment of unexpected drama — was close to that which made football or rugby or athletics so compelling. It was drama, but not tension.
The real tension of cricket is formulated in the minutes or even hours of relative nothingness. It can build slowly until everyone involved— the two batsmen, the bowler, the keeper, the nine fielders, the commentators, the crowd and even the umpires — is rapt.
The battle between batsman and bowler is primarily one of the mind. There is often some chatter — the term “sledging” to describe crude verbal gamesmanship seems to have originated in cricket — and the odd steep rising bouncer to bring an element of thetangible, of physicality, to proceedings but the real tension happens in the slow tightening of the screw: ball after ball after ball pitched on the exact spot to make it hard for the batsman to step forward or step back; the strategic captain’s repositioning of a fielder to the exact spot that might create a further concern in the mind of the batsman; doubt creeping in slowly, steadily, until it seems that the only avenues open to the batsman is to be got out or to get himself out.
Always, as the physics of pressure dictates, there eventually comes a release: the batter loses his wicket in order to keep his mind, or, if he has somehow, against all odds, won his battle, he pounces on even a slightly errant delivery to crack a square cut to the boundary, sending close-in fielders jumping for cover.
Ah, square cut.
Cricket has a language that is all its own.
Square leg. First slip. Mid off. Deep mid wicket. Gully. The crease. And that’s just positions on the field.
Batting and bowling also possess their own vernacular. The batsman can block, edge, cut, hook, sweep. (The reverse sweep is a shot choice where the only certainty is that either the bowler or the batsman will look silly.)
The bowler can swing, seam, bounce. You can have legspinners and offspinners who can finger spin or wrist spin. He can go over or around the wicket. One summer it seemed like there would never be anything in sport quite as beautiful as a Waqar Younis inswinging yorker.
The world would eventually change when more people knew of Google than Googly.
The need for instant gratification brought Facebook and Twitter, or Facebook and Twitter brought the need for instant gratification, I’m not sure which.
Instant gratification makes for an environment where everything devours itself every two days. In that environment, a need for manufactured drama is created.
In the world of 24-hour rolling sports channels it is not enough that drama might present itself beautifully and organically a couple of times a summer. It must be created to fill the void between the magic, and the sad inevitability is that the magic when it comes is distorted and diluted, the real Eiffel Tower reduced to the Eiffel Tower at the bottom of a whirring children’s kaleidoscope.
This 21st century need for instant gratification also brought the abomination that is Twenty 20 cricket, a game played on the same field by the same players. Same bat, same ball, different universe.
The task of protecting one’s wicket — the achievement of digging in, not giving up, seeing out the storm — and the successes and failures that even the best batsmen enjoy and endure, is not just part of Test cricket. It also mirrors the slings, the arrows and the satisfactions of a life well lived.
Twenty 20, in contrast, is akin to a tray of 50% proof shots at 2 in the morning: enjoyable, perhaps, in a few drunken moments but something you never look forward to and always regret.
The moment I stumbled upon that Monday afternoon. Moeen Ali, the England spin bowler, becoming the first England spinner in almost 80 years to take a hat-trick in Test cricket.
That’s another thing that cricket does proudly and brilliantly. It honours its history with alacrity, its every moment chalked down for posterity.
Test cricket is, even as it is happening, historic.
Everywhere else, sadly, there is not even now. There’s just “what’s next?”
