It’s official. According to the ICC’s championship table, Australia is the world’s fourth-ranked Test nation behind South Africa, India and Sri Lanka, and barely ahead of the country, England, that has just beaten it over the course of five Tests.
Feeling chastened? Quite possibly. So long have Australians luxuriated in the success of their cricket team that confirmation of recent decline is a moment for sober contemplation. Yet there is also something exciting about its possibilities. The World Test Championship has hardly captured the popular imagination in its six years, being a case of Australia, daylight and then the rest. And the fact of these rankings mattering as never before is extremely timely.
All round the world, Test cricket is under acute social, cultural and financial pressure. Five days is a whole working week, and we know how long these can seem. The advertising and television dollar is fleeing to Twenty20, cricket’s newest, shortest and richest format, which can be over in half the time Michael Hussey batted so tenaciously on the last day at The Oval.
South Africa, a fine team well led, has a lot to recommend it as Test cricket’s number one, but it has never drawn home crowds of any size. In India, Twenty20 omnipotent reigns, and where its television audience goes, money and prestige follow. A Test world in which Australia continued to exercise unipolar power would have offered steadily diminishing satisfactions.
This summer in England has been a cricket crossroads. The Ashes of 2009 followed closely two of cricket’s hottest versions of its new variant: the IPL in South Africa and the Twenty20 World Championship in England. In fact, to so soon after be plunged into a five-Test series, cricket’s most traditional and now almost obsolete format, felt a little like dressing in period costume for an activity of the Society for Creative Anachronism.
What ensued was not a vintage Ashes series. The teams were too weak and the Tests generally too one-sided. The advantage did not fluctuate; it swung back and forth like a wrecking ball, indicative of two teams at war with their frailties as much as with each other.
Yet they were genuine tests, of ability, adaptability, character, endurance. One saw cricketers in extremis: indulging in mass man-love one week, fit for trauma counselling the next; performing tasks requiring extraordinary patience and self-denial like Ricky Ponting’s superfine 150 in Cardiff and Michael Clarke’s sublime 136 at Lord’s, then exhibiting blink-of-an-eye brilliance like the run outs executed from close to the bat by Andrew Strauss and Simon Katich at The Oval.
Some games have one or the other. No game apart from Test cricket has both to such an extent. It is still the most thorough and authentic interrogation of a cricketer’s abilities: the full 360 degrees, rather than the 90 degrees of Twenty20, or the 180 degrees of the one-day international.
It is still the game, moreover, where we come to know the players best, from their on-field talents, their attitudes in action and repose, their mannerisms and musings. Andrew Flintoff at The Oval, as close to retired as one could be while still on a Test ground, was granted a last glimpse of the possible on the final day, his bazooka-like throw to demolish the stumps ahead of the Australian captain’s run tinged with grandeur and melancholy.
The Australian captain himself, so familiar to us hoisting trophies and popping champagne corks, has also shown a different side of himself this year: desperate and driven, but dignified and fair-minded. He has not been lucky; he has never complained or made excuses; in his daily dealings with the press and public, he has been a model both of honesty and of tact.
Test cricket, nonetheless, needs further fortification. One of its main problems is addressed by the world championship table, but only partly. There is a natural desire for a definitive answer to the question of which is the best Test nation, and it would best be determined by head-to-head contest leading to a final. Test cricket proves again and again that it is not archaic. But the old systems of bilateral arrangements and rigid cycles are.
The last great quality of the Test match is its sheer complexity, how much it gives us to think and talk about—the what was, the what did and the what might have been. A properly structured world championship would enrich the Test experience still further.