Putting an end to five day Test matches would diminish cricket

The ECB is relaxed about the suggestion that Test matches should be played over four days rather than five. Indeed it is quite interested in the idea. It would relieve congestion and make fewer demands on players. The counter-suggestion that a better way of doing this would be to play fewer ODIs and fewer international T20 matches is unlikely to appeal to the ECB – any more than the sensible suggestion to scrap its proposed “Hundred” tournament will be met with anything but silence.

One should admit that some of those who decry the 4-Day Tests proposal speak as if Test matches had always been played over five days. This isn’t so. For the first half-century of Test cricket matches in England were played over three days. In Australia on the other hand they were “timeless”, and played to a finish, draws being impossible. The fifth Test, as Melbourne in the 1928-9 Ashes series, went on into the eighth day. In England timeless Tests have been played when the sides were all square coming into the Fifth Test, the last such occasion being in 1972.

Four-day Tests were introduced in England for the Ashes series of 1930, though matches against other countries would mostly still be restricted to three days, the last three-day Test series in England being against New Zealand in 1949; all four matches were drawn.

So, the ECB might say, if four-day Tests were acceptable in the days of Don Bradman and Wally Hammond, why not now? Well, it’s a fair question and deserves a fair answer.

So let’s look at the Lord’s Test of 1930, remembered as one of the greatest Test matches.

England batted first and made 425 (K S Duleepsinhji 173). Australia replied with 729/6 declared (Bradman 254, Woodfull 155). England then made 375 (Chapman 121) and Australia made 72/3 to win the match on the fourth afternoon. The Don incidentally thought this his finest Test innings.

So there you are: a great match finished on the fourth afternoon. What’s not, as they say, to like? Consider this, however. In England’s first innings Australia bowled 129 overs. England then bowled 228 overs while Australia ran up that huge first innings score. There were then 106 overs in England’s second innings and 37 overs while Australia made the 72 runs they needed for victory.

In all therefore 500 overs were bowled in less than four full days. England bowled an average of 23 overs an hour while Australia scored 729 runs. With modern over-rates which frequently fall short of 90 overs a day, a match lasting 500 overs would go beyond five days and deep into a sixth. The 228 overs England bowled in Australia’s first innings would require more than eight two-hour sessions.

Anyone still think four-day Tests a great idea?  Well, yes, if you want to see more drawn matches.

Of course there are reasons – even extenuating ones – for today’s abysmal over-rates. Fewer overs are bowled by spinners. At Lord’s in 1930 the Somerset slow left-hander, Jack White, bowled 51 overs in Australia’s first innings, and Middlesex’s Walter Robins, a wrist-spinner, bowled 42. All the same the opening bowlers were worked hard, Gubby Allen, who was genuinely fast, bowling 34 overs, and Maurice Tate, perhaps about Jimmy Anderson’s pace, sending down 64.

More to the point, there are more frequent interruptions now. DRS referrals take minutes out of the game, and the fashion for short-pitched fast bowling means that it’s a rare session that doesn’t see physios trotting on to the field when batsmen are hit and require attention. Such unavoidable interruptions may cost three or four overs a session, ten or a dozen in a day.

All this means we are unlikely to see any improvement in over-rates. One may remark that in Cape Town this week there were times when two minutes elapsed between one over and the next.

In England in recent years not many Test matches have gone the full five-days, which some may see as a justification for reverting to 4-day Tests. This is partly because in general the bowling has been better than the batting, partly because less time is lost on account of bad weather than used to be the case. Improved drainage means that resumption of play after rain isn’t so often frustratingly delayed because of a wet outfield. Then the use of floodlights enables play to continue when the natural light has deteriorated to a point at which without them umpires would have taken the players off.

These are the only cricketing reasons for thinking that there is a case for reverting to 4-day Tests. They are scarcely persuasive. Even if, as proposed, the required number of overs in a day was raised from 90 to 98 (and who believes that this would be delivered?) there would still be a hundred fewer overs bowled in a modern 4-day Test than were bowled in less than four full days at Lord’s in 1930.

In any case the fifth day has often provided us with nail-biting tension and excitement. The sad death of Bob Willis shortly before Christmas has had us recalling and celebrating his wonderful 8 for 43 at Headingley in 1981 which enabled England to win a match by 18 runs after Botham’s remarkable century had set Australia the seemingly modest target of 130. Without a fifth day that game would have ended in a draw.

By good fortune the suggestion of reducing the number of Test match days from five to four has coincided with this week’s excellent and gripping five days in Cape Town. There were splendid individual performances and a close finish, but the point I would make is that the match was close enough and long enough to permit passages when the play was slow, yet also compelling. If it had been a 4-day Test there would have been muttering directed at Dom Sibley, Joe Denly and the South African debutant Pieter Malan, urging them to get a move on. Yet how much poorer the game would have been if they had bowed to such criticism. A slow session may be as integral a part of a Test match as a slow movement is of a symphony, and a Test match is a drama in five acts. I don’t say that all the great Tests one remembers go deep into the fifth day, but an awful lot of them have done so. The players recognize this. Ben Stokes is an outstanding cricketer in all the varieties of the game, but he says outright that 5-day Tests represent the greatest challenge – a challenge that is prolonged and mental as well as physical.

The truth is there is no good cricketing reason to make Test matches a day shorter. The desire to reduce the players’ workload may be laudable, but we could far more happily spare half-a-dozen one-day matches than five possible days of Test cricket in an English summer. If that thought horrifies the ECB, then the selectors have a remedy to hand: they can be more discriminating and rest Test players from several of these generally meaningless one-day games.

Better still of course: the ECB might abandon its unwanted Hundred folly which seems likely to bear as much relation to first-class cricket as a 15-minute “King Lear” would to Shakespeare’s play.

A final note, however. We traditionalists needn’t worry. Virat Kohli says “No” to 4-day Tests. So the 5-day Test is safe at least as long as he remains India’s captain. What Kohli and India say goes. Incidentally he also met an invitation to be part of the ECB’s deplorable “Hundred” with icy disdain. Good man as well as great batsman.