Tuesday, September 7, 2010

I’m not sure which is worse. That only 4,000 tickets were sold for yesterday’s neutral Test between Pakistan and Australia at Headingley. Or that the crowd would have been smaller still in Karachi. Either way, it’s hand-wringing time yet again for Test cricket’s supporters.

The England and Wales Cricket Board, who are hosting Pakistan’s ‘home’ series against Australia this summer, were particularly keen to take a Test to Leeds, an area with a large Pakistani population.

Not a county necessarily known for innovation, Yorkshire went a long way to attract local supporters staging food festivals, erecting places to pray, reducing ticket prices and generally doing all they could to welcome a new audience.

Despite their best efforts, though, Pakistani fans in Yorkshire seem even less interested in red ball cricket than Shahid Afridi is.
And therein lies a significant chunk of the problem.

The two headline acts of this English summer so far have been Afridi and Shaun Tait, neither of whom are remotely interested in playing the longest form of the game.

Chris Gayle (below), another blockbuster, famously “wouldn’t be sad if Test cricket died out”, while Freddie Flintoff, named yesterday in Chennai Super Kings’ squad for the Champions Trophy, has also worn whites for the last time.

These players - all of them box office - could be in a minority in favouring the big crowds and even bigger paydays of white-ball cricket. But I doubt it.

As John Stern said on Cricinfo this week, it’s far more likely that they are the tip of the iceberg, as a generation of cricketers follow a generation of fans in expressing their indifference to Test cricket. And if the players don’t care, then the game really will be up.

Imran Khan discussed these issues in the Spirit of Cricket lecture at Lord’s this week, and though nothing he said was particularly novel (“bowlers will start missing series” he bellowed, as if that hasn’t been happening for years already) the message was still fairly depressing.

Imran himself cashed in during his playing days by turning out for Sussex and New South Wales. He earned loose change by today’s standards, of course, but when such exertions affected his ability to bowl fast for Pakistan he knocked them both on the head and returned home to concentrate on the day job. Playing Test cricket for Pakistan was, for him, the pinnacle.

But that was then. Financially, and in terms of prestige, things are different now. With every poorly-attended series that passes (players outnumbered fans during South Africa’s tour of West Indies) I struggle to shake the feeling that Test cricket’s decline is terminal.

This column has spent plenty of time bemoaning the way greedy administrators have screwed up Test cricket (and all cricket, for that matter).

But all that’s based on the presumption that elite cricketers still consider Test matches to be the pinnacle of the game, a presumption which looks increasingly unsteady.