We are steadily but surely heading towards annihilation of Test cricket in India. This is a march that seems inexorable at the moment. And if that happens, it is bound to impact even Test-loving nations like Australia and England, whose players will increasingly find it hard to resist the lure of T20 because of the unimaginable amount of money and fame on offer in the Indian Premier League.
That the administrators in India are complicit in this dismantling of the traditional structure of the game goes without saying. Otherwise, what prompts them to make its team play, day in and day out, meaningless Test matches against Sri Lanka that no one wants to watch and in between, have them play a few one-day matches against Australia and New Zealand. All these contests lack context, reflected by very low spectator interest and falling TV ratings.
For any Indian cricket fan or even the players themselves, a full-fledged five-Test series on South African soil would have been the most challenging platform to test India’s growing strength as a team. One can understand that in the crammed international calendar, this may not have been possible, but to play three Tests and not four, just to accommodate more one-day and T20 matches is an indicator of priorities. India care little about the longest format of the game, even when their own team is in a position to do well and break fresh grounds.
The most telling commentary on what the future holds was revealed in Star’s buying the IPL television rights for a staggering Rs 16,347 crore over a five-year period. Whether this investment makes business sense or not is not the issue here, what is more important is that the broadcasters are now in a position to dictate terms and arm-twist the organisers to make IPL the prime event in India’s cricketing calendar.
The negative impact of these rapidly shifting priorities are already being felt. Star is not showing any Ranji Trophy game live in the league stages this season and the BCCI is doing nothing but twiddling its thumbs. It would not be right to assume that since the cricket administration in the country is in turmoil, there is no one to give it a proper direction. In the absence of any official explanation, one would not be wrong to assume that this has been done with the tacit approval of the board, or whoever is running it.
The IPL impact and its influence can also be seen in the manner the media highlighted Ashish Nehra’s retirement from T20 cricket. Among the most promising pace bowlers India has produced, Nehra failed to live up to expectations due to a fragile body which did not let him play more than 17 Tests and around 100 ODIs. Imagine a player who last played a Test for the country in 2004, around 13 years ago, and his last ODI in 2011, is being feted and lauded today on most sports pages of the country for retiring from the T20 format, as if one of the greats of the game has quit.
Nehra needs to be appreciated for making best use of a format which took less toll on his vulnerable body and he continued to play and excel in IPL till he was 38. But to make him larger than life for his T20 performances is a reflection of how our imagination is slowly being captured by this shortest format of the game. We could well be heading into a future where players will be known for how they performed in the Indian Premier League, with a footnote detailing their averages in the longer formats.
The Nehra splash in the media suggests that this could happen sooner than any of us can visualise.
The writer tweets @pradeepmagazine