With dropping attendances, bore draws and the huge push towards shorter versions of the game, it was nice to finally see an exciting finish to a 5-day test match yesterday. The second time in three matches in this series, actually. (In the other game, England obviously wiped the floor with sorry SA).
But while the last over histrionics, South Africa’s constant and often desperate appealing and Graeme “The Cramp Man” Smith’s wonderful innings and penchant for referring everything were all briefly gripping to watch, it was really only the last couple of hours of the game which were actually “exciting”.
All of which leads me to believe that in actual fact, Test cricket is still mainly boring. And that isn’t really a problem if you’re happy to be bored; if you have days to spare at the ground or on the couch, beer and snacks to hand. But for the majority of us, that’s not the case.
The problem as I see it is that in order to get the exciting finish, you have to sit at least through four days of potential dross. And yes, I know there were “gripping” bits here and there, like the Steyn vs Collingwood thing and Fatty’s lovely innings, but mainly it was quite dull going through to motions stuff. For 4½ days. And that’s why T20 – which condenses the best bits from Test cricket into a couple of hours and is therefore exciting – has become so popular.
So what I propose is this: T6000 cricket. In this new and revolutionary form of the game, one takes scenarios from all the Test matches in history which have ended in an exciting manner. (There must be at least three or four of them.)
These scenarios would then be played out to a finish in front of a capacity crowd. Games would consist of one innings of variable length, as the different scenarios would kick in at different times. For example, I would propose that for yesterday, we start at tea on the final day – after all, it was mostly pretty dull before that.
So England (or South Africa, depending on who wins the toss) would start 5 wickets down, needing to survive 35 overs.
In this case, the batting side could only ever get a draw, but them’s the breaks. And before you moan that you’ll never see the top batsmen playing, you’re wrong: the warm-up would consist of the top order being put through their paces before going and having a drink in the players lounge as their tail-enders actually play the game.
As an added benefit, since each 15-session match will now be played in one single session (a reduction of 93.33%), there will be less danger of player burn-out – a major cause of the top players not being able to play in the first place.
Sure, the purists will hate this, but they’re the ones with the time, the couch, the beer and the snacks.
For the vast majority, T6000 is the future.
