“Five-Day Test Cricket match is boring …” – NO, IT IS NOT!

 

“Five-Day Test Cricket match is boring …” – NO, IT IS NOT!

 

‘Freedom has a thousand charms to show,

That Slaves, howe’er contented, never know - William Cowper

 

The above lines carry least relevance to what I am going to write in this post. No, I am not going to talk about the slaves that William Cowper talked about. Rather, this post is about a kind of slave I am, to five-day cricket test match, watching on TV, a luxury I am affording myself in my retired life.

Yes, I am an anachronism. In this fast, get-it-done-yesterday world, even leisure comes pre-packaged with moment–wise activity schedule. Of course, without such a schedule, the vacationers would be lost. In my understanding, a vacation should be schedule-free, but not for the current corps of vacationers.

Yes, a Test Cricket match takes inordinate time, over five days; approximately 30 hours. A One Day International (ODI) takes about 7 ½ hours; a T20I, about 3 ½ hours. This slave to the test match is contented with seeing any cricket on TV, but I miss the charms of a test match.

One question to make a point: Has an ODI or a T20I ever kept you on the edge of your seat from morning (say, 09:00 hrs.) to about 16:30 hrs.? They could not have. Never. But, I was stuck to my chair for the full duration of a day’s play (including the lunch and tea breaks) for the test match at Eden Gardens in Kolkata (was it Calcutta in 2001? Who cares?).

I may be wrong in the commas and periods of the events of the fourth day of the match, India following on after its dismal first innings score. But, just listen to my memory. Every ball bowled by Australia on that day–I mean EVERY BALL–was a potential last nail on Indian team’s coffin. Yet, the then mighty Australians were denied, and how!

VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid (the Wall) just dug in, dug in, and dug in till stumps that day, fateful for the Australians. Every ball mattered. Digging in did not mean Ken Barrington’s (English cricketer) block-bloc-block strategy, but going after hittable balls with gusto (no sixes, if I remember right; too risky). VVSL scored a double century and RD, a century. Then, things happened on the final day and Harbhajan Singh took over in Australia’s second innings, scalped three or four wickets, all crucial.

Till the end, it was edge-of-the-seat tension. Will Australia, playing for a draw, be successful, an asterisked word, given the context India won? Would it not be a blot on their reputation? Yes, and yes, and it was not to be.      

India won. That was how.

This was not a one-off. More than a few decades earlier, I had heard, on All India Radio, Mansur Ali Khan, Nawab of Pataudi, score a double century by sending the ball across the rope on the last ball of a test match. That was excitement, even when everyone knew that the match was ending in a draw. He scored 203, I vividly remember, hearing it at my friend’s place, sneaking out of school. Yes, I have had my escapades!

One more, to round off, of being a witness of an unedifying collapse, when Australia and India played a test match at Chepauk. India was in a comfortable position. But, before I could have finished that sentence, Indian batting collapsed.

At stumps the previous day, Australians were reeling at 24 for 6 with all the biggies sent home. Then, Ian Redpath hit a skier that Ajit Wadekar could not hold on to (the sun was in his face, and it was on mine too, in the stands). The batsman made some 60 plus and that turned out to have been enough for an Australian win. The missed catch, there ended the match, a terrible loss.

Now, I am writing all of these without referring to any scrap book (I have none on this topic), no Googling. They just stayed in my mind as the voice of radio commentators, and, in the last episode narrated, a dispiriting personal experience, in sports.

It is not impossible that three or four decades later, some cricket fan now in his/her (my female cousin knew cricket stats upside down) could recall similar details of excitement in their ODI or T20I experience on TV.

I doubt it, though. There are just too many of them and one’s brain shovels horse shit every so often.

In my mind, I still carry them. So, it might not be about the format of the cricket, but more about how much. I was slave to test cricket in my youth because that was the only game in town. It ain’t so anymore.

Just musing: Will Cowper’s lines resonate with descendants of slaves among today’s youth?

Raghuram Ekambaram