Never try to explain Test cricket to an American. In sport, Americans value brevity, drama, a guaranteed resolution. Draws are anathema and ways must be found to avoid them. Two enterprising journalists once took Groucho Marx to an MCC game at Lord’s and he pronounced it “a wonderful cure for insomnia”.
What Groucho would have made of the “timeless” Test in Durban in March 1939 – it had been going on for 10 days before England, close to victory, decided that they had to catch the boat home – doesn’t bear thinking about. George Bernard Shaw summed it up perfectly: “The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.”
Yet, as the Lord’s Test between England and India that concluded on Monday in dramatic fashion with a victory for the home team by 22 runs showed, Test cricket can also provide the most gripping sport of all – in large part because it unfolds over five days, slowly gathering in intensity. Twenty20, where each side bats for 20 overs and the game is done and dusted in less than three hours (the baseball model), may be taking over cricket globally, but there is nothing that matches the complexity and sustained excitement of a hard‑fought Test. Twenty20, though immensely skilful in its own way, is bubblegum pop. A Test such as the one we have just witnessed is Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
This match will be ranked with Headingley 1981 and Edgbaston 2005 in the pantheon of unforgettable Tests of the modern era. Lord’s had everything: heroic performances – especially Ben Stokes, England’s bearded Siegfried, looking as intense as Bob Willis at Headingley in ’81; ill-feeling over the time-wasting tactics employed by both teams earlier in the match; a raucous crowd, with plenty of noisy but good-humoured support for both teams; and the bizarre denouement when the injured England novice spinner Shoaib Bashir bowled the feisty Mohammed Siraj to win the match. Siraj had middled the ball, but it spun back to hit the stumps, with Siraj, who could legally have kicked it away, seemingly transfixed. Bashir raced around the ground in ecstasy; Siraj was in tears; the earlier ill‑feeling was forgotten as England’s fielders consoled the Indian No 11. Drama, pathos, humanity: Hollywood (or indeed Bollywood) could not have written a better script.
Test cricket, as the Wisden editor Lawrence Booth told the Today programme on the morning after the match, is always in the middle of an existential crisis. As England were celebrating their mighty victory, the West Indies – in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s the best Test team in the world – were being bowled out ignominiously for 27 (the second-lowest Test total of all time) by Australia in front of empty stands in Jamaica.
Test cricket may be buoyant in the UK, but it is in desperate trouble in other countries where money is short and Twenty20 is seen as a more viable option. If the greatest form of the game is to survive and flourish, the cricketing authorities need to address the inequalities at the heart of global cricket. Let Lord’s 2025 be an inspiration, not an epitaph for a format that is sometimes seen as anachronistic in an age that demands instant gratification.
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