It’s all well and good to talk about giving more importance to Test cricket but difficult to take concrete action to achieve that. For most Test playing nations, dwindling attendances at matches and difficulty in generating interest around bilateral series is a serious challenge.
Resources are the biggest issue because cricket only generates a certain amount of money in most countries. In countries like South Africa and New Zealand, the sport has to compete with football and rugby to get a piece of the revenue pie that is already not very big to begin with. But that’s not the case in India.
The country has a gigantic fan base, a dynamic army of millennials who are hooked onto the game with big money coming in from the corporate and film world. How to maximise this problem of plenty can be as tricky an issue as distributing meagre resources.
India has been the biggest market for cricket for a long time but that did not translate into consistent results across formats up until a few years back. When India had one of its all-time great teams with the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Virender Sehwag and Anil Kumble, a handful of wins away from home were registered and the Indians even climbed to the top of the table in Test rankings.
But there was no great run like that of the Australians in early 2000s. Not even close. India began to win away from home base on a regular basis from around 2003 and success in major limited overs tournaments started under the leadership of Mahendra Singh Dhoni in 2007.
The riches brought in by the Indian Premier League led to huge pay days for India’s stars but the Test team lost its way following the 2011 World Cup win, losing eight away Tests in a row. A sense of direction was needed and the Indian establishment seems to have sorted its priorities on the field. Now that the sheen surrounding the Indian Premier League has lessened, following a few scandals and disquiet over its administration, the focus has shifted to the traditional aspect of the game – Tests.
While England and Australia are trying to replicate the success of the IPL model, they are doing so having established a strong Test structure which keeps producing capable red-ball players. India didn’t have that same culture.
But this season, things are different. Test cricket is where you witness a genuine contest between bat and ball over a period of time and the BCCI has acknowledged the same by scheduling 13 Tests at home against New Zealand, England, Australia and Bangladesh.
For the first time, the Indians have a dedicated cricket season, on the lines of those in England and Australia and they want to make it a recurring theme over the coming years, like the Boxing Day Test. More importantly, the Indian board has doubled the match fees for India’s Test players.
While earlier a player would earn 700,000 rupees (approximately Dh38,000) for playing a Test, he will now receive 1.5 million rupees (Dh82,000) per game. That is a big jump and makes the five-day format automatically attractive for younger players. It doesn’t match the mega bucks that the IPL offers but it is substantial in its own right.
BCCI president Anurag Thakur admitted that youngsters nowadays are more keen on featuring in T20 leagues, playing a few matches and making enough money to last a year or more. It’s only when players are suitably rewarded for fighting it out over five days that they will be eager to get involved.
Agreed, it’s easier to make such decisions when you have as much money as the BCCI has. But what is also true is that nothing of this kind had been attempted all these years. I hope that other boards also a take leaf out of BCCI’s book, in this aspect, and do something concrete to bolster the Test match structure.
And frankly speaking, this admiration for Tests has come at an opportune moment because ICC chairman Shashank Manohar doesn’t seem to be that upbeat about the format, saying “why would a person waste seven hours for five days on a Test, from 10-5?”.
Pakistan’s revival
As alarming as Pakistan’s drop in limited overs cricket has been, they have raised their game to a new level over the past month or so.
After dropping to ninth in the ODI rankings and fighting to qualify for the 2019 World Cup, Pakistan have turned things around dramatically. They won an ODI and a one-off T20 at the end of their England tour, blanked world champions West Indies 3-0 in the T20 series here in the UAE and continued their dominance by taking an unassailable 2-0 lead in the ODI series after comprehensive wins by margins of 111 and 59 runs.
Surely, there will be tougher tests later in the year across formats in New Zealand and Australia but they are beginning to make the right kind of noise in white-ball cricket after a long time.