Under the current economic and scheduling structure, Test cricket is dead in the water. Cricket skills, as in all repetitive sports, are the culmination of habit and it simply isn’t reasonable to suggest that the pre-eminence of shorter game forms can have anything other than a degenerative effect on the Test cricket.
I don’t doubt there are additional factors at work in Australia as in NZ, but nothing alters the basic tenet that you reap what you sow – the law of specificity guarantees that as cricketers play less long form and more short form their skills sets will adapt accordingly.
As an aside I think that the die was cast for Test cricket 20 years ago when the law limiting bouncers was first introduced.
Putting aside the reasons for having done so, the effect of this change was to remove one of the most dramatic and powerful elements in the game.
The new rule eviscerated the fast bowler and dramatically shifted the advantage to the batsman, much in the same way that raising the mound did for pitchers in baseball.
I doubt the long term consequences were fully imagined by the law makers at the time but what we can say now, two decades later, in the light of the rise and rise of short form cricket, is that the public demand big shots and don’t care particularly for the subtlety and nuance of fast bowling (and by extension for Test cricket).
I gave this a lot of thought a couple of weeks back and it’s my view that this is not an inevitable outcome – the tide of natural progression that can’t be turned back.
It is the direct result of the diet of possibilities having been dramatically and suddenly changed.
The future of Test cricket lies in moving the advantage line back toward the bowlers (in that form of the game) and in providing up-and-coming fast bowlers with something powerful with which to counteract 20 years of bat technology and increased proficiency for scoring sixes and fours.
Give the batsmen something to fear.
That’s what Test cricket used to be about, and that will be the only reason the public and revenue streams will flow back to it.
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