CricDigs Blogs

This morning while driving to work, I was lazily scanning through the FM channels and finally got back to the one I end up listening to most of the time even though I don’t like that particular program. It consists of the RJ putting a question/recent news item/fact and asking the listeners to send their opinion on it. Usually the question is about some stupid Bollywood gossip or some irritating piece of sensational new item … hence my aversion to the program. But today’s question was … “India will not be playing any Test Cricket this year… Is this the end of Test Cricket?”

It got my attention. Surely, it can’t be true! The Test Series win in New Zealand was still fresh in my mind. But now that I think of it… it sure was quite some time back. Reaching office, I checked to confirm that the last time we played a test match was in March this year. After that there was the T20 World Cup and the ODI series in West Indies. Of course, if you are an Indian, the IPL that happened in April-May would have attracted your attention as well. So if the claims of the RJ are true, India will not be playing another Test Series until at least March 2010. I further checked the ICC Future Tours program and it showed that India are scheduled to play a Test series against SL at home in Nov-Dec 2009 and another one against SA in Feb-Mar 2010. This gave me some relief, but, can the Futures Program be trusted?

Even if the RJ’s claims were not entirely correct, the fact did come as a surprise to me. So has Test Cricket finally started dying? If a cricket crazy country like India, which produces the most amount of money in World Cricket, does not play even one test match for almost a year, then it definitely is a cause for concern. Agreed that the recently completed Ashes Test series generated a lot of interest, but if you look at the other test series that were being played around the same time (SL Vs. Pak, Zim Vs. Ban, SL Vs. NZ), none of them generated any significant interest. And even the Ashes were hyped so much only because for a change, England were the favourites and finally won the series against the mighty Aussies.

Whether the Aussie reign has come to an end is a topic of discussion for another day. A bigger and more scary question is the future of test cricket. As an ardent fan of the format, I am really concerned about the beginning of the end. My fear increases even more when I meet today’s youngsters (a couple of my younger cousins actually) who were hooked on to the T20 World Cup but could not remember anything nor care less about India’s spectacular win in the Perth Test or even the series win against NZ.

One of the respondents to the radio show summarized my fear aptly - “Who has the time these days to watch one game for 5 days? As for me, I wouldn’t spend even one full day for one game”. The lad did not sound more than 20!

To rub salt into the wound, that respondent won the prize for the best response for the question!