When T20’s the real Test

In the Darwinian worldview, adaptability is the essence of evolution. A quote that is often attributed to Charles Darwin and reflects the world we have lived in reads: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change.”

Let us apply this argument and narrow down its applicability to the cricket world we inhabit today. It is a world financially in vigorous health, drawing crowds to the stadiums and making players richer and richer. It is adding great numbers to its bulging television viewership, with India providing the muscle and money that would sustain the game for many, many more years to come.

Yet the sport itself is in complete flux, causing an existential threat to its source, the roots of which are more than a century and a half old. In short, Test cricket, the fountainhead of the game, has never been more endangered today than it has ever been in the past, though the crisis is at least six decades old. A sport played over five days with intricate and even tedious skills to be mastered and on display, found it difficult to sustain itself from the 1970s onwards.

A world that is always in transition and in fast-forward mode would find it hard to adjust to slow-speed lanes, where pause and movement are interchangeable. It needed to adapt to the changing world. The 1970s saw the introduction of the One-day game and in 1975 expanded its canvas by organising its first World Cup. The balance started shifting towards the shorter version of Test cricket when the Australian tycoon Kerry Packer introduced coloured clothing and night cricket in floodlights to dazzle the cricket world by the end of the Seventies. The world that swore by the “purity” of the sport and found all slogs ugly and even “unchristian” was now forced to accept, even admire, the restructuring of the basic grammar of the game.

No cricketer synthesised and merged these two contrasting worlds better for the spectators in that period than the gum-chewing, broad, intimidating figure of Vivian Richards. The nonchalant arrogance with which he pulverised the ball and the speed at which he scored in both forms of the game was pure, unadulterated entertainment. Richards was the needle that probably kept the balance from completely tilting over the other side as he was the supreme master of the Test and One-day formats.

A genius is an exception not the norm and as the world moved on with technology speed-forwarding and hurtling the world into a supersonic age, cricket was again in a crisis. In this changing perception of the battle between slowness and speed, the 50-over game was now losing its traction. Once again, the world needed to adapt to this changing world.

A sport whose appeal was, in a manner of speaking, its emphasis on timelessness, was now further mutilated into becoming a breathless spectacle where time and space didn’t even exist. India’s 2007 T20 World Cup win and the introduction of the Indian Premier League in 2008 had a seismic impact on the sport. The spectators gulped these products as if hunger had never left them ever since they were born. As the zeros in the cheque book multiplied, so did the shower of sixes and fours on the ground. With each passing day, the frenzied world out there looks unrecognisable from the reflective, laidback world of the past.

The outrage at India’s multiple Test defeats, two consecutive whitewashes, at the hands of the New Zealanders and the South Africans, is misplaced. In the backdrop of the new world order to which we have willingly contributed, letting the market forces dictate our priorities, the unrestrained anger that television anchors reserve for individuals and the team is like a poor comedy show that neither entertains nor educates.

They all need to travel across the length and breadth of the country and watch kids playing the sport in whatever vacant spaces are available to them. Every batsman, whether using a proper bat or a broad wooden stick, tries to hit a four or a six to every ball he faces. Defence, once considered the edifice of this sport, is completely absent from their practice.

It is no different in the more organised coaching centres, where the top priority is how to hit a six or a four, regardless of the methods used, conventional or unconventional. Many who play or report on the game say that the most talented feel it is futile to train in building a long innings based on solid defensive techniques. It won’t fetch them an IPL contract. They abandon the conventional and focus solely on how to hit the ball long and far. It is said that while the best practice hitting big shots, the mediocre occupy their spaces in Ranji Trophy to score big and the worst in any case have no future.

A long T20 season is ahead of us, that includes the World Cup and the IPL. Those who were lamenting the dismaying fall of the Indian Test team are already busy eulogising the power of our six-hitting superstars. It will reach a crescendo in the World Cup where India will be the favourites and by the time the IPL is played, India will be left too breathless to even speak. The message is clear: adapt or perish.

— The writer is the author of ‘Not Quite Cricket’ and ‘Not Just Cricket’