An Advert for Five-Day Tests

IF TEST MATCHES had been reduced to being four-day contests, what would've happened? The recent Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy, which captured the imagination of the cricketing world, would have ended 0-0; hardly an advertisement for the longest format of the sport.

- Tushar Bhaduri

IF TEST MATCHES had been reduced to being four-day contests, what would've happened? The recent Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy, which captured the imagination of the cricketing world, would have ended 0-0; hardly an advertisement for the longest format of the sport. We would've been denied the 56-minute series finale — the drama, suspense, agony, ecstasy and heroism when sports mirrors life in a microcosm. If the match had ended with England needing 35 runs and India four wickets, everyone would have left with an empty feeling in their stomach, having been denied something.

A four-day game would have denied England the thrill of the big last-day chase in Leeds and kept everyone unsatisfied if the Lord's Test ended with India needing 135 runs and the hosts six wickets. Even the euphoria of the Manchester draw, as India recovered from 0-2 in the third innings — staring at a 311-run deficit — would have been muted if they didn't have to bat out a fifth day.

One can't rush through life; things happen when they have to. Some Tests do end inside three or four days, but that's the natural course of events; just how things turn out. For every mismatch — West Indies 27 all out recently in Jamaica, where the fourth innings lasted a grand total of 14.3 overs, is a case in point — there is the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy where the result was in doubt going into the final session of almost every match.

Five-day slugfests — like 12-round heavyweight boxing bouts (it used to be 15 in years gone by) — can sometimes take competitors to hitherto uncharted territory and force them to do something they may not have known they were capable of. In a sense, they tell sportspersons more about themselves than any abridged form of contest ever can.