by daniel
10. June 2010 16:37
Where have all the test matches gone? No sooner has the Sofa settled back into the familiar rhythms of five day (and sometimes three day) cricket, with all that entails (like Zoob's 2 day anecdotes) than it's all snatched away again. The fixture schedule this summer is as barmy as it has ever been. Yee Gods, when I were a lad championship cricket happened consistently throughout the summer. 40 over games were regular Sunday fixtures, and the two other limited over bashes were shoe horned into the start of the season (B&H) or sprinkled every few weeks through June, July and August (NatWest/Gillette). Test matches, once they started in early June continued, once more at regular intervals, through the remainder of the summer. You knew where you were. Three square meals a day with Bran Flakes to keep you regular.
So, having just got used to 4 day cricket and the resumption of tests after 60 days of transcontinental T20 thrashabouts (a proper three course lunch after a pain au chocolat for breakfast), blow me if we don't have to endure two months more of hit and giggle, with a single, lonely championship fixture in late June. Eight Mars bars a day with a plate of toad in the hole at 2 in the morning. The cricketing equivalent of impacted guts.
Presumably this is in a desperate attempt to match the IPL by concentrating all the T20 matches around the next 6 weeks and hoping that we forget any other form of cricket ever existed. The effect will surely be to leave England's players entirely out of nick by the time they play Pakistan at the end of July. The poor Pakistanis have to undergo 4 back to back tests to accommodate this tomfoolery. Yes, four. Insanity. The first test will be competed between one side that resembles Clint Eastwood emerging from the desert in the Good the Bad and the Ugly and another that has forgotten the rules (not the laws; they'll stay the same). Is this Modi's masterplan to destroy test cricket using Giles Clarke as the ironic agent of its destruction?
If there is anything positive in the crazy scheduling it is that England cricket matches don't clash with the football World Cup. Die hard cricket fans may complain that this is akin to Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper from a plane proclaiming peace, but the realists amongst us can at least be assured that when our game is played, it will be as close to centre stage as possible.
Thank God, then, for the Pakistan v. Australia test series starting on 13th July. If the England players will be out of nick come their next match, at least the Sofa team will have been warming up on their behalf. And in all likelihood, we'll be co-opted into the management team as "Test Match Reacquaintance Consultants". Just don't be surprised if Michael Lumb ends up taking guard on the first morning because Alastair Cook is undergoing colonic irrigation with a vibratory de-compactor to shift those Mars bars.