Changes In Test Cricket

Its been a long while since I posted about cricket. But I can’t keep my thoughts away from this game for too long. So my posts too can’ remain away from this game.

Recently ICC chief David Morgan said about bringing some changes to test cricket in order to bring interest of the followers, to the traditional format of the game, who are at the moment hooked to the T20 cricket. The most talked about change is reducing the test game to a 4 day affair from the current 5 day affair. Well I don’t think that it will help much as most don’t like test cricket for most of the test games are draw and reducing it to a 4 day match will increase the no. of draw games. For this change to work  ICC will have to bring in more changes like, as mentioned in todays TOI letting each side bat only for a day and reducing no. of overs in a day to 80 overs. If the side batting first is bowled out inside a day then the other side will bat the remaining day and the next day which is scheduled to be their batting day. And the most important one if the side batting second failed to reach its target and is not bowled out then declare the side batting first as the winner instead of declaring it as a draw.

Well this idea looks exciting for me but it has its disadvantages like we will hardly get to see the kind of innings Gambhir played against New Zealand in the second test earlier this year to chalk out a draw for India and let India be in the lead. After all these types of innings are the real kind of test innings. We also will not get to see a triple century to see unless someone like Sehwag plays a whirlwind innings at the top of the innings and yeah that will mean Lara’s record of 400 will remain unchallenged.

The T20 version will always remain the audience favourite as it gets winded in 3 hours (unless you are like me as I was recently got bored by too much of T20 cricket) while test match lasts for nearly 8 hours * 5 days.  There will be more ideas of this kind in many peoples mind and whichever idea ICC adopts I hope it won’t affect the real test values.

Many  traditional followers believe that test cricket shouldn’t be tinkered but if we want the interest in test matches to improve we have to change it. Just hoping it doesn’t tinkers the real values of test cricket as I stated earlier.

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