Lord’s looks a little different this week. The grass is the same shade of green, the pavilion still terracotta red, but the International Cricket Council, which runs the World Test Championship, has papered over every last trace of everyone else’s branding, from the posters outside publicising Middlesex’s upcoming games, to the sponsors’ logos spray-painted on the outfield. They’ve changed every last hoarding and billboard around the ground, and reprogrammed the three big screens so that they display, throughout the game, the slogans of their own sponsors. “Thums up Cola! Taste the Thunder!”
They’ve even installed six big bright-orange sofas in the Allen Stand, on behalf of Sobha Realty, which goes by the motto “Art of the Detail”. There were unconfirmed rumours that an apparatchik had been spotted taping over the egg-and-bacon stripes on the members’ ties. Anything to make sure everything is arranged exactly as the ICC’s chief executive, Jay Shah, likes it.
If you don’t know, Shah is one of sports great young achievers. He became secretary of the Gujarat Cricket Association when he was 25, secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India at 31, and chair of the International Cricket Council when he was just 36. You can only imagine how proud his family must be of it all. Especially his father, Amit Shah, who is Narendra Modi’s right-hand man, and India’s minister for home affairs. They say that when Shah started at the ICC he made a point of pushing through a few ruthless staffing decisions just to prove to everybody that he is his own man.
The upshot, anyway, is that right now cricket is beginning to feel worryingly like it is an international sport being run on one man’s whims. And this week, the game is making every effort to arrange itself around him. The MCC certainly wants him to be as comfortable as possible, especially after he didn’t bother to turn up to its World Cricket Connects conference for “the most influential voices in the sport” last weekend. It even invited Shah to ring the bell to mark the start of play before the final. I swear there were even a couple of MCC members giving him applause for doing such a good job of tugging on the rope.
“A privilege,” Shah wrote on X later that same afternoon, from his seat in the president’s box, where the ECB’s own executives, chair Richard Thompson and chief executive Richard Gould, seemed to be busy failing to get his attention. The first World Test Championship final had a worldwide audience of 180 million, this one is beginning to feel like it’s trying to win over an audience of one, because the only way it can really be sure of itself is if Shah believes it’s worth persisting with.
Anytime two Test cricket fans get together, there’s sure to be a conversation about the state of the game. There were 25,000 odd here on the first day, and the background chat was about whether or not the Test schedule should be changed so that India, Australia, and England can play each other more often; whether the 12 teams might soon be split into two divisions; if it even makes sense for the smaller nations to play it given that it costs so much money to arrange games against and between them; or whether, as everybody knows it ought to, the game needs to change the way revenues are being distributed so those same smaller teams can afford to play.
Test cricket has been going for almost 150 years now, and yet somehow it still feels like it needs to prove it has a future. This is the first time that the showpiece final hasn’t involved India, and the knock-on effect is that the viewing figures are unlikely to make much of an argument for the format.
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Good thing, then, that Australia and South Africa did during a superb first day’s play. The quality of the batting, bowling, and catching was a cut above any of the cricket held in England so far this summer. There were spells, through the morning, and just after lunch, when the contest between South Africa’s opening bowlers Kagiso Rabada and Marco Jansen, and Australia’s vaunted top-order batsmen, Steve Smith, Marnus Labuschagne, and Travis Head, felt like stop-what-you’re doing cricket. If you looked around the ground then, no one was nodding off, or nattering away, or looking at their phone. Almost everyone’s attention was on what was happening in the middle.
A little later in the day, once the sun was out, Shah was spotted taking selfies with fans around the back of the grandstands. He seemed to be enjoying himself. And everyone who loves Test cricket ought to be happy to hear it.
