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Twenty20 Cricket has certainly changed the cricketing landscape and everyone has an opinion on whether Test cricket will survive beyond the next 20 years.
Test Cricket is a magnificent game that in the past has allowed the ilk of players such as Richie Benaud and Steve Waugh to showcase the craft of the game and the skills they have developed over many years initiating from backyard cricket.
Benaud and Waugh were just like your average kid playing by the conventional rules of backyard cricket. A small rubbish bin was used as stumps, the fence is four, and over the fence is six and out.
No matter where you lived, once daylight savings hit and summer arrived, every Australian kid experienced the ultimate sibling rivalry competing in a game of backyard cricket.
The disappearance of Test cricket won’t be as a result of Twenty20. It will simply be a lack of development at the grass roots level, particularly backyard cricket.
The appeal of the highly energetic, fast pace spectacle has drawn in large crowds since its Australian inception in 2005. The new format is driven to compete with rival codes and broadcast of an evening to cater for working Australian families who can’t attend the daytime slot of Test cricket.
Indian Premier League commissioner Lalit Modi believes that if Test cricket doesn’t carry on into the evening time slot, the game will slowly disappear.
“Test cricket has a big problem: it is played in the daytime when most people are working,” Mr. Modi told The Guardian.
“It lasts only three hours and people don’t have time any more to sit all day watching cricket. We’re competing with football and other sports and I think three hours is a good time limit to help us expand the market. We are definitely bringing new consumers to cricket,” the IPL chief explained.
Modi continued to say that Twenty20 cricket will become the dominant form of the game which has been embraced by many people across the country. It offers a glimpse of the best parts of the game over three hours rather than five days.
To simply reunite the youth’s passion with Test Cricket, we need to get back to basics and play a bit of backyard cricket.
The shrinkage in backyard space as a result of our growing population doesn’t mean an end to backyard cricket. If there is limited space it simply offers an alternative — what about street cricket?
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