ABSTRACT

In these days of fast food and fast money, it seems on the surface that cricket, especially when it reaches the apogee of Test matches, offers a respite and a return to those days of halcyon cricket invoked by Lord Denning’s vision of peaceful and bucolic splendour. After all, a five-day Test does not offer a quick fix but a slow, deliberate build-up. It is more like our other life experiences, before globalized economies, with peaks and valleys, ebbs and flows, missed opportunities and opportunities seized, all coming not in a 60-minute interval, with breaks for commercials but over a more human time-frame. As spectators, we have time to get to know the participants in a Test, they perform in front of our gaze for hours and days, allowing their true character to be revealed. If there is one element of cricket which has remained essential to its character, it is this sense of expanded time. If one aspect of cricket distinguishes it from the modern age of sport between TV adverts, it is this sense of time expanded to real dimensions. Of course, there is the ever-vexing question of the One-Day game. This is a version of cricket created for and determined by, the demands of our modern televisual reality. ‘Limited’ overs cricket is for the purist and true believer not really cricket by the very fact of its artificially constrained temporal limits. There is ‘real’ cricket and then there is the pyjama game. Different players, different crowds, different rules, ‘not cricket’. It appears the ultimate irony, then, that one of the major controversies in modern Test cricket involved the issue of time wasting.