Over the long history of international cricket, unless the home side happens to be obviously inferior to the visiting team, it has usually been much harder to win away from home. Pitches have frequently been prepared to fit the needs of the local side. There is also the factor that unless a country is well supported overseas (as by England’s travelling Barmy Army battalion, or in England by large numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan) then there is the added difficulty of playing in front of noisy and sometimes intimidating partisan crowds.
This is nowadays less of a problem for countries playing Test matches in India because attendances at most of the grounds have dropped dramatically. It seems now that many Indian cricket followers prefer to save their money for entry to the shorter format of the game, not least the screaming and flashing Indian Premier League. And in the current Pakistan vs England Tests on “neutral” territory in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the terraces with their vacant coloured plastic seats echo even more sadly, easing the situation for the cricketers from far away.
Yet, how could anybody have predicted the extent of India’s thumping fall from grace in the Test matches played away from home in the past nine months? Nobody could have had the faintest inkling that Dhoni and his men would lose all four Test matches in England last year and then suffer just as ignominious a thumping in Australia recently. Those eight defeats were all by very big margins.
Opinions will be divided as to whether the causes were purely technical or mental, or were there other distractions? Did India’s eye leave the ball through with too much thought given to Sachin Tendulkar’s elusive 100th international hundred? Is the honour of representing your country now just a routine part of life, with the lucrative crash-bang-wallop of the IPL always around the corner?
The world of cricket should welcome one thing above all else. The Test scene has been dramatically revived. It has rallied not just by virtue of its current exciting unpredictability. No longer is there an all-conquering Australia roaming the streets. Almost anyone can beat anyone else nowadays. It is also a pleasing fact that there have been very few draws of late. Even many of the draws have been thrillers, especially where England have been involved. Several times their last-wicket pair have hung on for pulsating overs, first to defy Australia and then South Africa.
How come that Test matches are nowadays nearly all ending with a positive result? Well, allowing that there is still a welcome cluster of high and usually attractive big personal scores from our elite batsmen, wickets continue to fall with such regularity that we’re growing accustomed to seeing a winner and a loser within five days. I’ve even heard one slightly mad suggestion that Tests should now be reduced to a four-day maximum duration.
If you’d like to know how and why most of the three-day Test matches of long ago regularly finished inside the distance, the answer is that the players really got on with it, bowling at least 20 overs per hour. And the pitches were not protected. They were rained upon, mopped up, and then the fun began. Only slow bowlers could keep a steady foothold on the damp turf, and they became almost unplayable. But by the same token, highly skilled batsmen (Trumper, Ranjitsinhji, Hobbs, Hammond and Hutton, to name but five) displayed their full genius, removing the bat from the more venomous leaping deliveries, jabbing down on the ankle-crushers, flicking the ball away for a run here and there. It was tense stuff, and it is a teasing exercise just to imagine who among today’s pampered generation of batsmen might be successful if pitches ever again were left open to the weather. Rahul Dravid comes to mind, but not many others.
However, from out of our batsman-friendly modern era has sprung yet another of cricket’s never-ending unpredictables. After many wasted years of flapping, the administrators have finally managed to grasp the necessity of employing video playbacks [DRS] to ascertain the truth behind claims for a wicket. They’re still missing the obvious: that the players should not be involved beyond the initial appeal. If the official “overseer” upstairs spots a possible problem, no further ball should be bowled until he has thoroughly analysed the replay and relayed his finding to the umpire in the middle.
This aside, the fact is that many more lbws are now being given, and batsmen everywhere are in a mild state of shock. Where it was once safe to plunge the front pad well down the wicket, this no longer persuades an umpire to shake his head. Umpires at last have been shown that many of those balls would have gone on to touch the stumps. Spin bowlers are profiting bounteously. It’s almost as if an extra way of getting out has been introduced. It has persuaded some batsmen to try to rebuild their techniques. And it is a key factor in more matches ending sooner than they would have done under the old order. England off-spinner Graeme Swann recently assessed that he had taken one-third more wickets since the DRS was adopted, many of them left-handers. (Offsetting this, he considers that Alastair Cook’s phenomenal 766 runs in the five 2010-11 Tests in Australia might have been halved or worse had the truth shown by the DRS not been adopted on several occasions.)
If this leg-before-wicket phenomenon explains why Test matches are reaching a conclusion faster than before, it is not a viable explanation for teams seemingly losing away from home more often. There can be no connection. Nor is the lack of crowd support away from home a logical reason. It must surely come down to the fact that relative playing strengths inevitably fluctuate as the years pass. It once seemed that West Indies would be world champions forever (no ICC rankings needed in the 1980s). But their production line of fast bowlers juddered to a halt for some reason, as did that for their star batsmen. Then Australia, for an even longer period, beat everyone else regularly, a supremacy under Allan Border, Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting that seemed such that it would go on indefinitely, home and away.
Well, the rest of the world didn’t give up hope. India eventually became No.1. Then came England. Who’s to be next? I suggest it will be some well-led and multi-talented team capable of handling alien conditions when away from home. Favouritism or inefficiency by umpires can no longer be factors.
David Frith was recently presented with the Cricket Society’s Ian Jackson Award for Distinguished Services to Cricket
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