What our desire for bullet trains can tell us about the future of Test cricket

Social impulses are almost always in conflict, spawning contrarian yearnings. We are, for instance, torn between slowness and speed, manifest in our desire to save Test cricket from its crawl into oblivion, and intense excitement to reduce travel time through bullet trains running at superlative speed.

Call it Saving Test cricket versus Riding Bullet Trains, or Slowness versus Speed. In their essence, Test cricket and bullet trains are two different planets orbiting at speeds in contrast to each other.

Test cricket is what bullet trains are not meant to be. It is a journey involving all of five days, and even then the final destination – at least for those who think of a win or a loss as one – might never be reached. Test cricket revels in the gradual unfolding of time, comprising a series of episodic actions that acquire a larger meaning as the game spills from one day to another.

Test cricket has its stages – a batsman could unleash a flurry of strokes to have the scoreboard ticking at a furious pace; or there could be spells of relative somnolence as he keeps dropping the ball at his feet with a dead defensive bat or offering pads to vicious spinning deliveries.

Even when little is happening – with neither runs being scored at a clip nor wickets falling at regular intervals – it invites you to understand and appreciate the ever-changing reality. It assumes there is joy in this appreciation – perhaps the wicket has turned tricky and caution is required to try to turn an impending defeat into a draw.

Slowness in the age of speed

Test cricket began to acquire an anachronistic feel in India, as also the world, as it entered the era in which noodles could be cooked in two minutes, and even more so as pre-cooked food arrived on shop shelves, tantalising us with its promise of providing us an extra hour or two squeezed out of a routine anchored to the clock.

Or, to put it another way, to enjoy Test cricket is akin to choosing the shuttle over the express train – and, as it will be soon, the bullet train.

As the bug of speed and impatience bit us Indians, as also others around the world, cricket administrators re-imagined the game – first came the 50-over game, and the crowds for the Tests began to dwindle. At its further abbreviation to 20-20, stadiums hosting a Test match seemed like uninhabitable islands on which some people had been inadvertently airdropped.

To the lament of Test aficionados – what’s a sport without an audience – the common refrain was the problem of finding time for a game spread over five days. Cricket administrators around the globe began to wonder: Can’t the three formats of the sport survive simultaneously?

The question, come to think of it, is pertinent in the backdrop of innovations in the railways – after all, the shuttle, the express, the super-express and the bullet trains will, in the foreseeable future, operate at the same time.

Differential fare rates determine the choice of speed at which you wish to travel by rail. Yet the excitement over the bullet train testifies that it is everyman’s dream to reach Kolkata from Delhi in five hours, against the 17 the Rajdhani Express presently takes, or to board the bullet in Delhi at 6 am and disembark at Varanasi before 9 am.

It is not differential ticket rates but the quality of the sport, to the very taste of cricket, so to speak, that is driving its administrators to rethink the Test. There is consensus on the incompleteness of the 50-over and 20-over formats. The skill-set required for five-day cricket are considered superior to the other formats. It is easier to turn out an admirable performance in a 20-over game than to sustain it over five days, in conditions which can change from hour to hour, day to day, not neutralised by rules on bowling and fielding restrictions.

The day-night Test

Can cricket be called cricket if it survives at its most inferior skill-level?

Knowing the answer, cricket administrators took to thinking of ways of reviving Test cricket. There was, for instance, the proposal of Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, arguably India’s greatest captain. He suggested that Test cricket should be reduced to four days, both teams getting 90 overs each in the first innings, with the second confined to 60 overs each. It combined, as he said, the skills required for the long format and the certainty of having a result on Day Four.

But four days in the era of brevity was just a day less than five. Pataudi had failed to take into account the paucity of time in an era of technological breakthroughs, which constantly redefine the speed at which we work, travel and live.

The decision to experiment with day-night Test cricket in India – the first of its kind was played between Australia and New Zealand in Adelaide – has an edge over Pataudi’s proposal as it takes the factor of time into account. Indeed, time looms over Test cricket as an insurmountable challenge. Administrators now seek to overcome it through a format in which the Test will begin late afternoon when the morning freshness would have evaporated, and continue into the night under the glare of floodlights.

Administrators think they have created time for spectators. It is hoped spectators will come to the stadium in their leisure hour, after work. The first day-night Test at Adelaide was touted a success – it pulled 47,441 people on Day One, 42,372 on Day 2, and 33,923 on the third, which is when Australia won the low-scoring match.

Cricket writers are already expressing their worries over tailoring the traditional Test into a day-night format. For one, the morning advantage will no longer be there. Instead, the late evening hours will have batsmen playing with extreme caution – the pink ball will swing viciously, for instance, in Indian conditions and the wicket will have a thick grass cover to ensure the pink-cherry doesn’t get scruffy and become difficult to sight. Spinners will undoubtedly find the going tough.

Explaining his opposition to the idea of day-night Tests, former English batsman Kevin Pietersen pointed out, “Who wants to see a new ball at certain grounds around the world at 8 o’clock at night under lights. Are you mad? You’ve got to change all the statistics.”

Pietersen also said he would have his openers come at night to negotiate the swing at night. From this perspective, a Tendulkar would be more suited to open the batting in the afternoon and a Gavaskar held back for late evening hours to tackle the fast swinging deliveries.

These criticisms of the day-night format underscore the philosophical problem at the heart of the crisis in cricket – when administrators tinker around to adjust to the extant notions of slowness and speed, to the paucity of time, the sport is invariably altered to the point that it seems a sharp break from the past and its traditions.

A necessary reinvention

What is true of cricket is also true of train journeys – in fact, of life as such.

A journey of less than five hours to cover a distance you do now in 17 will be qualitatively different. It won’t be a journey but a ride. A ride that will become a few hours of blur, the gazing out of the train window will acquire another meaning, a novel won’t be finished from cover to cover, and chance meetings with engaging strangers – an endearing aspect of train journeys in India – rare, and establishing rapport with them even rarer. Strapped to our seats, hurtling through dedicated rail corridors, glued to our laptops and mobile phones, we will become isolated atoms in frenetic motion.

Like cricket, train journeys have undergone constant abbreviations, a shortening. We have the 50-over and 20-over cricket equivalents in the railways. We welcomed it – who wouldn’t wish a journey of 32 hours to be shortened to half of it. But the bullet train will redefine as never before the passage of time in a land where pushcarts and pedal-rickshaws still ply.

The bullet train is the railway equivalent of seven-a-side playing a 12-over cricket match. The gains from a speedy mode of communication forever seeking to become speedier are many – you cut distances, move people faster, make their life more comfortable, and save on time.

Saving on time by speeding up work and travel is the framework of modern existence. The traditional five-day cricket format is outside the modern frame. To enter it, Test cricket has to redefine its relationship with time, in the process also accept the change in its very personality, regardless of whether or not the day-night experiment succeeds.

There is a paradoxical quality to our life. Technological innovations were said to promise a quicker, speedier life to expand our leisure hours. But the breathless speed of our life has us working even more than before.

In print journalism, for instance, one person edited the copy, a proof-reader detected spelling errors, and a third person made the page as you saw it the following morning. All three roles are now combined in one person as he or she struggles to meet the deadline.

Cricket administrators seem to have understood the truism of our modern life – the faster we live the less time we have – evident in their attempts to resuscitate Test cricket through day-night encounters. They seem to have accepted that our modern selves, hooked to speed, are incapable of appreciating the traditional format of Test cricket – played in daylight, in whites, with a red cherry.

This is perhaps truer of our land, jubilant at the impending whoosh of bullet trains.

Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid.