Ducking Beamers writes a post about why Test cricket has no future in America because of its length. I find the question and reasoning rather strange for a variety of reasons.
First is that the New York Times is totally, completely, absolutely wrong when it says, “a slugfest that takes forever to finish makes sense; a game that goes on and on with only six, or seven, runs doesn’t quite compute.” Hello, does anyone remember the 2004 ALC Series? The Boston Red Sox down 0-3. So what do we have in Game 4? 12 innings and Red Sox winning by 6-4. What about Game 5? 14 innings and Red Sox winning by 5-4, the match taking almost 6 hours to complete. The turnaround finally culminated in the Red Sox finally winning the World Series after 86 years and the matches became part of history. Does anyone think that those matches would have been better if the Red Sox had bludgeoned the Yankees into submission?
The thing that makes sport meaningful is narrative. If you don’t know soccer, when you see a soccer match, you see two teams running back and forth on a ground and you think what an aimless sport where they cannot even put the ball in a big net most of the time (I mean, how could they when their main aim is to break the legs of the opposition players). Or if you don’t know basketball, you see the opposite. Each team goes and puts the ball in the other’s basket and the other side repeats this. Ad nauseum.
But if one of the sides is your home country and it is a knockout match at the World Cup or the Olympics, suddenly there is meaning. You cheer every forward movement by your team, you yell at the referee for not punishing the opposition’s foul hard enough (why not a red card, you scream), every advance by the opposition sinks your heart. Even if you know nothing about the sport, you learn everything you need to know during the match.
There are different ways why a match might acquire more meaning. As mentioned above, a home team or an important match could make it so. For example, you might have watched Spain v Netherlands in the World Cup final even if you didn’t care about either team. Another factor is the opposition and how you factor against them. India v Pakistan is always a huge draw not only because of the politics involved, but also because each team is capable of defeating the other on its day. For the same reasons, Sri Lanka v Bangladesh is not an attractive match.
When it comes to Test matches, the main attraction for viewers is anticipation. I remember watching Kumble’s first home Test series against England. When each ball left his hand, I would expect him to take a wicket. Or Tendulkar. Even though he never did it for a long time, I would watch him hoping that this time it would a Test double century. Test cricket is about the journey – the hope, the anxiety and the depression!
Now, one-day cricket and Twenty20 cricket have their own appeal, but ultimately the form of cricket is irrelevant to the watching experience. You are there to enjoy the sport and living life through the experiences of the sports players in the field. You vicariously enjoy their ups and downs. Sometimes it is short, sweet and a bit dirty (Twenty20), sometimes it is prolonged, draining, but satisfying experience (Tests), but it is the same thing that drives us to watch moving pictures, whether it be a 20-minute sitcom or a 3-hour feature film.
If and when America learns to appreciate cricket as a sport, perhaps when the photos of President Kal Penn playing cricket instead of golf on the weekends are plastered across the then-Drudge home page, then the cricket fans will learn to love cricket in all its dimensions. In fact, we will see American cricket lovers at that point bemoaning the cultureless creatures of the younger generation who find joy in the shorter versions of the game instead of the nuanced thrills of the five-day match.