Sri Lanka will shortly go on to tour the West Indies. What will be disappointing about the tour is the fact that there will be just two Tests, hardly enough for the teams to get the measure of each other and demonstrate their ability in the five-day version of the game. One-day cricket, no matter what its charms, does not provide a true strength of the character of a team; only the five-day game can bring that to the fore. No cricketer worth his salt would argue with that.
And so the question arises, why are we still hearing of two-Test and three-Test tours? If a team has made it to the Test level, this means that they are able to do battle on something like an even keel with the other countries which have similar status. Understandably, given the rivalry which has grown over time, the series between some teams have better billing than others. But this does not mean that newer teams should be short-charged. New Zealand hammered Sri Lanka at home but would things have been the same in a five-Test series?
Lanka have reason to believe that they are the best one-day side in the world at the moment. They have provided plenty of proof to back this up. Yet, they have never got the chance to play a full-fledged Test series against any team. And they gained Test status quite some time ago. The fact that they managed to beat Pakistan at home speaks a lot for their abilities as this is always considered one of the most difficult things to do. And Pakistan have, for long, been the unpredictable ones of world cricket, coming out with brilliant performances one day and then playing worse than an associate member the next.
The ICC has no stand on the number of Tests played during a tour, leaving it to the countries concerned to fix up things between themselves. Each and every one of the boards pays lip service to Test cricket but a majority of them are now more concerned about the number of one-day tournaments which their team can contest. It is a matter of guarantee money and that is the only criterion which many boards are bothered about. Shorter Test series are okay as long as there are ten times as many one-dayers.
A classic example is the one-off Test which Australia played in India last year. What did it prove? India then played three Tests in South Africa as did Australia. The only five-Test contests for some time have been the Windies-Australia and India-Windies series. The Ashes are too sacred to be tampered with as yet. There would be too many howls of protest. These two- and three-Test series seem to pop up every month or two and they end well before either team has really come into its own.
I can hear a number of voices barking out that the number of Tests being played is irrelevant, what matters is that some are played. Why then was it decided long, long ago that there would be five Tests? Or four or six? Simply because cricket, more than anything else, is a test of character, a game that brings a lot to the fore. There is more to it than the simple wham-bam-thank-you-ma'an approach which is the one-day diet and which is force-fed to audiences all over the world time and time again ad nauseum. No matter what a cricketer may have done in the one-day game, he always considers his Test performance more of an indicator of his ability; this is not my theory, but what any cricketer worth his salt would say.
There is a seemingly mindless trend which has crept into the game these days and it is damaging the teams from the subcontinent more than others. The administrators from these countries appear to have decided that they should send their teams for as many one-day tournaments as possible and push Test cricket into the background. Too much emphasis is laid on outdated rivalries which have fed on bigotry in the past. The question of India and Pakistan playing Tests against each other is pushed into the background and the number of venues at which they can match wits in one-day tournaments is being increased.
The one-day game has its rightful place and it is bringing in the money. A three-match one-day series and a five-Test series would be ideal to get an idea of the relative merits and demerits of any two teams. If one has to take the idea of a Test championship seriously, then there has to be some thinking on the direction the game is taking. In the hustle and bustle of raking in the next million and sewing up the next TV contract, administrators appear to be forgetting that the game itself deserves some examination. No cricketer or administrator is greater than the game and if the spirit of cricket is lost then all these gold-diggers would have nowhere to go.