Over the last week, I have experienced cricket at opposite ends of its spectrum.
At Lord’s, on the first, second and fourth days, Test cricket between England and India was at its most intense. I was not present on the third day to witness the batting masterclass provided by England captain Joe Root, but there was a passage of play in the middle session of the fourth day that starkly underlined the contrast between Test cricket and the shorter formats of T20 and the Hundred.
After 23.1 overs, India had been reduced to 55 runs for three wickets with the dismissal of their talismanic captain Virat Kohli. This meant that, on aggregate, they were only 28 runs in front with seven wickets remaining. At the crease were two high quality batsmen under pressure to score runs because they had been short of them in their three previous innings. Their very places in the team may have been in jeopardy had they failed.
In the next 49.3 overs, almost 300 deliveries, they added 100 runs in painstaking and, at times, painful manner. One run every three balls irritated the English supporters, who took to sarcastic applause when one of the batsmen, Cheteshwar Pujara, scored his first run from the 35th delivery he faced.
The same happened when he reached double figures and when he had faced a 100 balls, amassing 11 runs. On the other hand, the Indian supporters cheered their relief at the act of survival, sensing that the balance of the game might be turning in their favor.
It is ironic that at the Oval, across in south London, later in the day, two teams in the Hundred competition scored 271 runs off 196 balls. The contrast between the two formats could not have been any sharper. One is focused on scoring as many runs as quickly as possible in a short time with the maximum background noise allowed. The other is a game of cat and mouse, of fluctuating fortunes, individual battles, tactics, and passages of play when recognition of the state of the match is paramount.
This was the case with India’s two batsmen in the afternoon of day four. Had they been dismissed cheaply, England would have been in the ascendancy. As it was, they provided a springboard for what turned out to be a glorious victory late on the final day, as England crumbled, in a feisty finish.
Nobody will ever know how many of the spectators at the Oval appreciated the significance of the passage of play at Lord’s in the afternoon session. Equally, no one will ever know what proportion of the crowd at Lord’s were present because they are adherents of Test cricket as opposed to the shorter format.
Until the advent of the Hundred, the shorter and longer formats had found a way to co-exist, but a new divisiveness seems to have entered the game. This is likely to fuel the debate about the suitability of shorter formats in preparing cricketers for successful performances in Test match cricket.
At the end of the day’s play, I headed for a completely different cricketing experience.
During the 1950s, Birkbeck College, a constituent of the University of London, assembled a cricket team to embark on a tour of Gloucestershire to play a number of matches against local clubs. Initially, it was organized by a prominent historian and Birkbeck academic of the time, Prof. Douglas Dakin, who was a native of the county.
In the early years, I am told, the party was large enough to supply two teams against local opposition. Over the years, however, numbers decreased, and when I was first introduced to the tour in 2005 by a former academic colleague who had toured since 1975, there were just enough players to complete five fixtures in the week.
Direct links with Birkbeck College have long gone and the tour can survive only through the supply of players from a southwest London friendly team run by one of the regular tourists. This enables three fixtures to be honored, one of which is against a team named the Fossils.
They are a pool of around 75, mainly in their 60s and 70s, drawn from an area south, west and northeast of Birmingham. So far in the 2021 season, they have played about 40 matches, two per week.
Cricket played by people in this age group across the country is now widespread, with national competitive tournaments for over-40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. This is a remarkable development. It sits at odds with the falling level of participation among younger age groups and goes a long way to explaining the thinking behind the Hundred. Notably, none of the Fossil or Birkbeck groups that I spoke to had warmed to the new tournament.
Conversely, those in favor of the new tournament may view the sight of older players performing the game in what seems like slow motion — joints, muscles and limbs struggling at times to act in unison — as faintly ridiculous.
Yet, this is the beauty of cricket. It provides the opportunity for people of all ages and abilities to engage with it, in teams, in a variety of formats. The same game was being played at Lord’s and in a village on the borders of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, albeit at slower speeds.
Cricket authorities and senior figures in the game have a responsibility to ensure that these opportunities continue to be provided and watched around the world within a sensible, non-divisive, structure and atmosphere.
