Ashes 2011

Ashes 2011 Read Free

Book: Ashes 2011 Read Free
Author: Gideon Haigh
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average thirty-something binge-drinker. Finally, there are your T20s. These appeal to ten-year-olds – and doesn't cricket just love ten-year-olds at the moment? Complicated, eh? Are you still with me?
    Of course, this is mainly cant, even without making a pedantic point about the regional variations in one-day cricket between 40-over, split-innings formats etc. For one thing, four-day, first-class cricket is always left out of these vauntings. Why? Probably as much of it is played as any of the foregoing. But somehow, cricket administrators keep forgetting about it. The impression you get is that they would just as soon it was not around, standing as it does inconveniently in the path of wringing the maximum money from everything. The other variation that has stealthily peeled off is Ashes cricket: the idea of five five-day Test matches, once the summit format of international competition, now kept alive only by Australia and England.
    It's probably India who tolled the knell on this form of the game following the 1987 World Cup. Soon after, India hosted West Indies in a five-Test series, which while it was under way was reduced, over the visitors' protestations, to a four-Test series, for the sake of adding two further one-day internationals to a scheduled five. India has not staged a five-Test series since.
    The West Indies' long-running Test supremacy fanned its interest in the five-Test series. They played South Africa at home in 1998–99 and away in 2000–01, Australia away in 2000–01 and India at home in 2001–02. But as its stock of talent dwindled so did dedication to the genre (five games were scheduled in the Caribbean early last year, only for the one on the ground better suited to cows than cricketers to be cancelled). Which left South Africa, until it lost to England at home in 2004–05. Since then the only countries to pursue the five-Test series have been its originators.
    Why would one want to argue for five Tests as a variation distinguishable from the two- and three-Test series that have since proliferated? Short Test series are too apt to hinge on one-off performances or particular sessions to be completely satisfying; the Tests are often held on top of one another after minimal preparation, so that the possibilities of regrouping after a defeat, or significantly rethinking selection, are minimised; the chances of a player having impact are likely as not to be a factor of conditions rather than of all-round skill.
    Yet India, the world's number one Test nation, likes its Tests in couplets – they are hardly worth the name 'series' any more. In order to keep its ICC rank, it squeezed couplets in against South Africa, Bangladesh and Australia, plus a three-Test series against Sri Lanka. All contained good cricket; all hardly seemed to start before finishing. What one would have given for more of the first encounter, after the rivals had taken turns knocking the stuffing from each other.
    The five-Test series, by contrast, gives a cricketer's temperament, technique, endurance, versatility and resilience the most thorough work-out possible, in all conditions and match situations, against all skills and variations, as an individual and a member of a collective. To be genuinely consistent over this longest of courses, to maintain a positive frame of mind far from home through a campaign of such duration, is to achieve something genuinely rare. On the evidence of last year's Ashes, in fact, modern cricketers are struggling to meet the challenge.
    This summer in Australia, furthermore, you may very well witness this event's last efflorescence: that is, five five-day matches as a season's centrepiece. If Cricket Australia has its way, by the time England is scheduled to return in 2013–14, international fixtures will be in competition with, if not overshadowed by, a supranational T20 competition. And that aforementioned Holy Trinity of formats might be looking more like the Odd

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