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So the doctors at the ICC have admitted to the presence of a patient critically ill in their ICU. And now they must hope that the drug they have recommended is potent enough to lead to a recovery. I wish I could be certain enough to say it will. But you know how it is when you look at the reports and shake your head gravely.
For the qualities it demands of its players, for the microcosm of life itself that it is, there is no greater sport than Test cricket. It rewards patience, it glorifies resilience, it respects defiance. It asks questions of you relentlessly and hardly ever gives you an escape route other than the one that you forge through sheer ability. It looks at an average player and says "Go somewhere else". But it gives you a second chance and that is what I find most glorious and humane about Test cricket. It upholds values that I have always held dear and that is why I love Test cricket.
But sometimes you have to bow to the tides, to the passage of time. Photographers loved the palette that Kodachrome Gold offered them, music lovers rave about vinyl over digital. But those numbers don't sustain businesses. I know people think weighing sport in the scale of business is cringe-worthy but survival depends on sustainability and I greatly fear the numbers are telling us an extremely uncomfortable story about Test cricket.
In India, Test cricket rates around 1. To put that in perspective, ODI cricket rates a 4 which is also the average for an IPL game and an India international T20 rates a 6. Kabaddi, now in a much longer season, rates 1.6. Even keeping in mind the fact that some of these are smaller, more concentrated bursts of action, the numbers are telling. Test cricket cannot compete, it has to be handled with care, till such time as care can sustain it.
In some other parts of the world, the ratings aren't as critical because income comes from subscription and having a lot of days of cricket justifies the subscription. But in India, where an overwhelming percentage of the revenue comes from, you have to earn through advertising and that is dependent entirely on ratings. You cannot go to large advertisers and say "We need to protect Test cricket over T20, so please can you continue to support us in spite of the fewer people watching".
My fear is that the new Test championship seeks, intentionally or otherwise, to ensure that the calendar is fuller with Test cricket leaving smaller windows for T20. I realise that we will only be able to say that definitively once the calendars are decided but that is a fair assumption to make at this stage. It is a dangerous move because the viewers will see what they want to see not what they are told to see. If you replace T20 with Test cricket, they will find T20 elsewhere, or they might watch kabaddi, or move over to the soap that is forever competing with live sport for the remote on the family TV.
I realised a tipping point had come when South Africa came to India a couple of years ago. It was a fight for No. 1, the visitors were full of players that Indian audiences knew and liked and hardly anyone watched it. The numbers apparently have been marginally better since but it is like the pulse improving to 40. It is not significant.
One of the reasons ascribed to the downward slide of Test cricket is the absence of context. It is a tricky one. If a contest between two nations has to depend entirely on context, we are in trouble anyway. It is a factor as we have seen with the U-17 Fifa World Cup where it was context that provided viewership to India games. And so, I am all for providing context, but I do hope the ICC isn't trying to get Test cricket to compete with shorter form cricket. If that is the objective, I am afraid it is doomed. Today's generation is unlikely to jump up and down with joy over a format that provides a result two years later, especially if it comes at the expense of what they want to see.
I really hope the influencers in our game, the leaders and opinion makers, aren't relying on the voices in their little spheres of life and pitching Test cricket as the face of our sport to its commercial stakeholders. Yes, Test cricket must survive, I dearly wish it does, but it is now about holding on to what we have for as long as we have it. Test cricket cannot stop the onslaught of the shorter forms of the game and must co-exist, it cannot compete. Giving it context is excellent if the objective is to defend your turf, it isn't much use as a weapon to stop the march of popular choice.
(CRICBUZZ)
