Birmingham: Swaths of empty seats are never a good look at a sporting event. But when that event is the first Test match of the season between perennial rivals England and India, and it is England’s 1,000th Test, the sight of bare stands in the Edgbaston ground poses an existential question. Could it be, as more alarmist voices have begun to warn, that the days of the five-day cricket contest are numbered?
There may well be mundane explanations for this week’s no-shows. The decision to start the match on a Wednesday, rather than the usual Thursday, has been questioned. Ticket prices — which start at £29 for an adult and £16 for a child — have been attacked as too expensive and more than, for instance, previous England-Pakistan Tests. And it may be that peak holiday season means some cricket enthusiasts are actually away. Subsequent matches at Lord’s and Trent Bridge may provide a more accurate gauge of the sport’s following.
And yet ... cricket in general and Test cricket in particular do seem to be in the process of being pushed out of the sporting mainstream. You can still see cricket played in parks and on village greens — but it is a sight (and a sound — John Major’s “smack of leather on willow”) that is now rare enough to be remarked upon with a certain nostalgic sense of curiosity. How many state schools still have the space, the enthusiasm and the coaches to field cricket teams, either competitively or at all?
How many children regularly watch cricket now? Cricket terms — innings and (maiden) overs, the sticky wicket, hitting fours and even sixes — are embedded in the national lexicon, common figures of speech, but for how much longer? Terms such as leg before, silly mid-off and the like might have been mildly ridiculed, but the names of the national team were widely known.
For all the fond memories of sitting on the front row of rickety seats at Trent Bridge, when nothing much seemed to happen on the pitch for hours on end, perhaps the space and time that traditional Test cricket demands just do not suit the pace of life today. If cricket has a future, it may be only in its curtailed versions — the one-day limited-over games, or the gripping Twenty20.But even if the Test match is, like so much else, succumbing to the inexorable trend for instant gratification, the crisis is not just about the time it takes to get a result. It is almost 30 years since Test cricket began its now complete migration to pay-TV, and the audience for live Test cricket has shrunk accordingly, both on television and at the grounds. Only recently, it appears, did the cricketing powers-that-be (the England and Wales Cricket Board) and the broadcasters come to realise that something of significance was being lost. International cricket, including some Test cricket and Twenty20, will be back on the BBC from 2020.
For Test cricket, though, that may be too late. The best part of a generation has been effectively excluded from watching what was once the major national summer sport on television. Is it any wonder that participation and spectator numbers go down? The same argument could be made about other team sports — even football — where matches involving national teams have been progressively banished from Freeview, and your average punter is palmed off with “highlights”. The essence of sport is that the live experience, and universal access to national sports — as was so evident during the recent football World Cup — can also help to foster social cohesion.
It’s probably premature to panic, about Test cricket at least. Tickets for Friday’s play at Edgbaston were sold out, with an extra stand opened to meet demand. Widespread publicity for the empty seats, the proximity of the weekend and the excitement of the previous day’s play — including a showy century from the Indian captain, Virat Kohli — may have combined to fuel interest. But perhaps cricket lovers should also begin to make a different kind of case for the game they love.
Much has been made of how the pace of daily life is perpetually accelerating. But that perception has produced its own backlash. The concept of slow food began in Italy. Slow fashion has its advocates in the UK and France, while long-form has found a following in journalism. Given these precedents, surely Test cricket should be ripe for a comeback. The Test match could become the flagship of slow sport: a match played over five days, where the rituals of breaking for lunch and tea, the rubbing of the ball, the patting of the wicket, and the repositioning of the fielders, are as much part of the game as the dramatic run-out or the deep humiliation of being bowled middle-stump.
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