After Trent Bridge, I fear for the future of Test cricket

With Twenty-20, have cricket’s administrators sown the seeds of the game’s eventual destruction?

BATTER. I hate that term. It’s just a word, but to me it encapsulates so much of what has gone wrong with cricket over the past decade or so.

For a start, it’s an Americanism, a term that has been transplanted from baseball.

When I was playing club cricket in my teens, we referred to them as batsmen, not batters.

But imperceptibly over time, the term changed, just as cricket has changed so much.

Now “batter” is ubiquitous and whenever I hear it said, even during a Test match, it sparks in me a jolt of anger about how cricket is being slowly destroyed before our eyes by a combination of greed, money and instant gratification.

It’s easy to describe it as Americanisation, but that’s not really accurate. This is really more about how corporatism or commercialism has eroded the traditional purity of the game.

That’s what happens when you allow the game to administered by a cadre of shadowy accountants, marketing phonies and shameless fixers who can only see dollar signs and have no respect for the distinct culture that separates cricket from every other sport.

Nor do they seem to care about the damage their short-term pursuit of profit is doing to the game.

My starting point in writing this rant is the abysmal collapse of the Australian team to be all out for 60 on the first morning of the fourth Test at Nottingham of this year’s Ashes series.

Much of the analysis I have read over the past 24 hours has hit out at the individuals within the Australian team, and no doubt they are culpable.

There has been finger pointing and calls for heads to roll, but the role of the Australian game’s administrators in all this has not been properly examined. The experts are blaming all sorts of reasons for the batting failures, but ignoring the one that is staring them in the face.

Put simply, the way the Australians in particular have collapsed several times this series reflects a much deeper malaise in the game, which is partly the fault of coaching, but more significantly the outcome of the strategic decisions made by cricket’s administrators especially in Australia to chase the Twenty-20 rabbit down its hole, at the expense of Test cricket.

If Australia’s overnight capitulation at Trent Bridge isn’t ringing alarm bells for how the shorter forms of the game have corrupted the skills required for Test cricket, then I don’t know what will.

As the name big bash implies, Twenty-20 cricket is weighted towards batsmen with its flat pitches, heavy bats, short boundaries; the bowlers are just there as cannon fodder. It’s fast-scoring, and has encouraged more creative, free-flowing strokeplay that has seeped into the other forms of cricket.

But the downside is that raised on slap and tickle cricket, today’s batsmen have neither the technique nor the temperament to graft a score or to rescue an innings in Test cricket. The entire impetus of Twenty-20 is to hit the cover off the ball from the start. If they are unable to execute their Plan A of smash and grab, they have no Plan B alternative.

But Test cricket is the opposite. Tests aren’t about instant gratification. The word “test” should give you a clue: it’s a grind over five days, the advantage swinging backwards and forwards from team to team.

At its best, Test cricket ebbs and flows; it has moments of breathtaking drama, and long periods of mind-numbing boredom. It draws on deep wells of intelligence and courage, commitment and determination. It has peaks of joy, exhilaration and triumph, and lows of failure, depression and introspection.

It can be both joyous and frustrating within the same match. Its rewards often lie in the persistence and endurance against your opponent, and sometimes, the greatest result is no result at all: a draw.

Much like life, really.

Good cricket comes on slowly, and great games and personal achievements are never forgotten.

Great Test matches become part of the game’s history: the Tied Test at the Gabba in 1960; Headingley 1981; Adelaide 1993; the Madras tie in 1986; Boxing Day in Melbourne 1987; the Centenary Test 1977; Edgbaston in 2005.

But who can even remember who won the Big Bash League last season? And who cares?

What cricket should never be about is instant gratification.

The administrators justify Twenty-20 by saying it caters for time-poor modern life. That it is an introduction to the game for kids, that will lead onto them appreciating the longer forms. That the money it generates will help to finance the development and expansion of Test and first class cricket.

But it’s really just about profits, and about cannibalising what is great about cricket to generate more of them.

What rankles most about Twenty-20 is the artifice of manufacturing a sense of excitement and non-stop action, which no matter how many fireworks you let off for each wicket and themed rock songs you play for each new batsman, can never match the drama, tension and unpredictability of a good Test match.

It’s a cheap analogy but a true one that Twenty-20 is like a pre-packaged fast food burger compared to Test cricket’s four course gourmet dinner.

The worst impact of Twenty-20 cricket is that it has rapidly devalued the qualities that have always been essential for Test and first class cricket: patience, grit, protecting your wicket, knowing when not to play a shot.

Today’s players are playing so much short form cricket that they are unable to adapt to the longer form and adjust for the conditions or the character of the match.

So, to an extent, the inability of the Australian and English teams to play out a five day Test isn’t only the players’ fault.

David Warner is perhaps the ultimate example of this. He is the embodiment of a cricketer produced by the Twenty-20 system: aggressive, inventive, powerful and a rapid scorer; all great assets in a 20 over innings.

But he only knows one speed (fast) and one direction (straight ahead), and lacks the wit and ability to change if things aren’t going his way.

If he’s not smacking fours back over the bowler’s head with his heavy lump of wood, he doesn’t have the patience or the ability to knuckle down and keep his wicket intact until the bowlers are worn down. He’d rather go down swinging than win the mental battle of wits with the bowlers. Which doesn’t really matter in a match which is over in a couple of hours, but is a liability in a five day Test.

But at Trent Bridge, what was desperately needed was an old-fashioned Test innings.

To be fair, Warner copped a brute of a ball in the first innings which would have dismissed most batsmen. But what about his skipper?

With his team five or so wickets down, and his own score only just in double-figures, Michael Clarke should have done an Allan Border: knuckled down, farmed the strike, refused to concede his wicket, even if it meant resisting his natural aggression and scoring slowly.

Sometimes in Test cricket, that is what is required: slowly accumulating the runs, being prepared to go for overs at a stretch without scoring until the danger has been seen off.

But instead, Clarke got out to a terribly loose drive at the edge of the pitch outside the off stump, his bat miles from his pads and his feet fixed to the crease, caught in slips. In a meaningless Twenty-20 game it wouldn’t have mattered — there’s always tomorrow, hey? — but that kind of irresponsible, reckless batting costs Test matches.

Clarke’s career at the top level pre-dates Twenty-20, and he has played less of it than many of his contemporaries, but no doubt it has also infected his batting.

So the big question now is can Test cricket be saved? Because if we keep seeing Ashes matches being completed in less than three days with one team walking all over the other, what is the attraction?

It’s wishful thinking to hope that cricket’s modern day administrators are going to kill their golden goose of Twenty-20.

But they must understand that you reap what you sow, and that because of the corrupting influence of Twenty-20, the first innings gave us a glimpse of the future of Test cricket.

And it wasn’t pretty.