The Incredible, Shrinking Game

Night cricket is played in a shiny bubble made for entertainment. The IPL바카라�s nocturnal aesthetic embraces gaudiness with its gilt pads, shiny cheerleaders and huckster emcees trying to crank up the excitement. The IPL has invented a simplified, sixer-happy version of the game where pehalwan hitters perform for look-at-me stadium fans and look-at-anything television audiences trying to escape the alienation of their working lives. The IPL is a two-month, 74 episode soap with a guaranteed climax.

Visually, the RCB-PBKS final was a hot mess. Both teams wore red, making colour-coded partisanship hard for irregular spectators like me. It was a frustrating episode where the nominated star, Virat Kohli, played a hesitant, halting T20 innings, scoring just 43 runs in 35 balls and won, while Shashank Singh produced a T20 masterclass, scoring 61 unbeaten runs in 30 balls with six sixes, and lost. Jio Hotstar did its best to make us feel the significance of the moment: after 18 loyal years with RCB, Kohli had finally won the IPL. We were meant to care.

There was no reason to. Kohli is now a middling T20 player. This is his worst format. His decision to stay with RCB is a business decision between him and the franchise; it바카라�s a fan바카라�s prerogative to nurse delusions of loyalty, but no one else is obliged to go along with the charade. Franchises will sometimes cultivate tentpole players like M. S. Dhoni and Kohli for commercial rather than cricketing reasons. Dhoni, for example, no longer earns his place in the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) team. He바카라�s too slow and too neutered by spin to close out matches like he used to. CSK plays him as a mascot now, as a brand-building, fan-pleasing ploy.

A franchise바카라�s need to build brand loyalty to a team in a relatively new tournament partly explains the tragic aftermath of the game, as fans were invited into the Chinnaswamy Stadium to celebrate the win the next evening, without crowd-control measures in place and several people died in the ensuing stampede.

The Cricket of Yesterday

As children, our loyalty to the Indian cricket team needed no cultivation because it piggybacked on a taken-for-granted attachment to India. My career following cricket is currently sandwiched between this IPL final and the 1964 tour of M. J. K Smith바카라�s MCC side. I didn바카라�t watch that five Test tour on television because there was no television 60 years ago. I followed it via radio commentary on All India Radio.

The visuals were supplied by the black-and-white pictures in the sports pages of the dailies. The first cricket photo I can remember is Budhi Kunderan bowled, stretching forward in defence, by Fred Titmus in the Corporation Stadium in what was then Madras. It was published in Sport and Pastime, the Hindu바카라�s indispensable sports magazine, and I suspect the reason I remember it is that Kunderan had scored 197, then a record score for a wicketkeeper.

As modern fans deluged by live telecasts and highlight reels with whole libraries of images accessible online, we forget how picture-starved we were as cricket fans before live telecasts and the dawn of the digital world. One of the collector바카라�s items of that 1964 tour was a spiral-bound pamphlet called 바카라�Album of Cricket Stars바카라� with photos of every member of both teams in brilliant colour. It was published by Esso, a petroleum company that ran gas stations across India. You bought the blank album, minus the pictures, and then, each time your parents stopped for petrol, you were rewarded with photos; how many depended on how much petrol you bought. There were 37 pictures in all. The English squad was pretty undistinguished because a tour of India was then considered hardship duty. Frank Tyson, Fred Trueman and Brian Statham gave it a miss, but there were photos of two English batting greats, Ken Barrington and Colin Cowdrey, who played a couple of Tests each.

On our side, there was the Nawab of Pataudi, Vijay Manjrekar, Chandu Borde, Bapu Nadkarni and Salim Durani among others. There was a brief career summary next to each photograph. At the very end of the pamphlet were two pages of Test cricket바카라�s records, from the highest score in an innings (903, Eng vs Aus) to the most wickets taken by a bowler in an innings (10, Jim Laker), which I committed to memory. That album was an early repository of cricketing photos and data, better produced than a magazine and less ephemeral. To my boy바카라�s mind that Esso album was Cricinfo in embryo.

Nostalgia is easy; being nostalgic about Test cricket is even easier because there is something about sunlit pavilions and players in long whites going about their business for days on end, which is genuinely beautiful. But we know that the economy of cricket before the limited-overs game made it a respectable living, was brutal and demeaning for players who weren바카라�t independently wealthy. The IPL has made cricket a lucrative career for many, not just for those who get to play representative international cricket. Many inspiring stories of players, who came from nothing and then made it to the top, wouldn바카라�t have been possible without the enabling ecology of the IPL. Top-tier cricket using the metrics of money and fame, is now available to a much broader base of players than it was before the IPL was inaugurated. It is, if you like, a more democratic sport.

Does that make my rooted preference for Test cricket reactionary? The world of fiction and cinema is crowded with elegiac works like Giuseppe De Lampedusa바카라�s The Leopard and Satyajit Ray바카라�s Jalsaghar that evoke sophisticated feudal worlds, their refinement threatened by vulgar but economically dynamic philistines. In Jalsaghar, Ray paints a wonderful picture of the zamindar as a patron, but that isn바카라�t the persona I want to inhabit as a booster of Test cricket.

Kohli allayed my anxiety. In an interview after RCB won, he said, 바카라�This moment is right up there with the best moments I바카라�ve had in my career. But it still marks five levels under Test cricket. That바카라�s how much I value Test cricket. And that바카라�s how much I love Test cricket. So I would just urge the youngsters coming through to treat that format with respect.바카라�

Kohli, one of the veteran multi-format cricketers of our time, used the moment of RCB바카라�s T20 triumph to declare that Test cricket was the most evolved form of cricket, the summit to which every ambitious cricketer should aspire. Spectators like me who haven바카라�t played the game competitively, hesitate to set one form of cricket above the other out of relativist scruple. Since each format has its own rules, excellence in each must be judged on its own terms.

What Kohli allows us to say is that Test cricket is, precisely because of its duration, the most rigorous test of a player바카라�s skills. Abbreviating the format produces new economic opportunities바카라�world cups, franchise tournaments, new audiences바카라�but these come at the expense of the complexity that makes Test cricket the marvel that it is. T20 cricket has produced new skills that have enriched the long game바카라�more athletic fielding, a wider repertoire of attacking shots, different sorts of slower balls바카라�but as a rule, it has simplified the game, reduced it to its primary colours, bleached it of some of the cunning and subtlety and skill that made Test cricket such a sophisticated contest.

T20's Thrill, Test Cricket's Loss

The challenge of a wearing track or an old ball, the possibility of reverse swing after 30 overs, the stamina needed to bowl a hostile spell of short-pitched bowling, the defensive skills needed to keep your wicket intact, the pressure of a slip cordon, the anxiety of knowing that the opposition바카라�s lethal fast bowler isn바카라�t done after four overs, are missing from the IPL. The T20 game is a one note format organised around the simple thrill of hitting. Cricket analyst Kartikeya Date has argued that T20바카라�s batters are properly thought of as hitters because the best of them have abandoned the risk-reward caution that makes proper Test match batting what it is. It바카라�s possible to be a genius hitter in this short format (Suryakumar Yadav comes to mind) and therefore to be a connoisseur of that specialised skill, but a format that can reduce Jasprit Bumrah to an extra, doesn바카라�t have that much else to marvel at.

In a perfect world, T20 franchise cricket will co-exist with Test cricket as it does now. The T20 game will, inevitably eat up more of cricket바카라�s calendar as countries establish their own franchise tournaments. The balance will work for cricket바카라�s Big Three바카라�India, England and Australia바카라�who play the Lion바카라�s share of Tests, have the resources to give their Test squads annual contracts and the clout to make the International Cricket Council (ICC) schedule the calendar around their convenience.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) seems committed to making Test aspirants play first-class cricket which suggests that the long game in India won바카라�t have to look to the T20 format for its talent pool. First-class cricket in England and Australia isn바카라�t as robust as supporters of Test cricket would like it to be, but the enthusiasm for Tests seems as strong as ever. I travelled to Australia to watch India play the fourth and fifth Tests in Melbourne and Sydney. Nearly 375,000 spectators watched the Test at the MCG, an all-time record, and Sydney was similarly filled to capacity. Between the Border-Gavaskar Trophy and the Anglo-Australian obsession with the Ashes, top-tier Test cricket seems alive and well in the medium term.

The other encouraging sign is that the World Test Championship (WTC) with all its defects has played its part in loosening the monopoly of the Big Three. New Zealand has reached the finals of the WTC twice and won it once, beating India soundly by eight wickets. This cycle바카라�s final will be played between Australia and South Africa with England and India watching from the sidelines. Despite being allocated many fewer Tests than India or England, South Africa바카라�s consistency in the Tests that it did play, saw it through to the finals. With some luck, the BCCI will learn that giving Test cricket바카라�s middle nations바카라�Sri Lanka, South Africa, New Zealand and Bangladesh바카라�a fair shake will make Test cricket a more diverse and competitive sport.

That said, India바카라�s imminent Test series in England this summer might show us where India stands in cricket바카라�s pecking order without a single member of the Ajinkya Rahane, Cheteshwar Pujara, Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli quartet available for duty. More concerning, because Tests, unlike T20 matches, turn on bowling, is Mohammed Shami바카라�s absence, Jasprit Bumrah바카라�s dodgy fitness and Gautam Gambhir바카라�s eccentric habit of sending India into battle with barely three seam bowlers when four are an obvious requirement. The upside is that India has lost six of its last eight Tests under Jay Shah and Gambhir바카라�s double-engine sarkar so it can바카라�t get much worse. Can it?

(Views expressed are personal)

Mukul Kesavan is a writer and columnist

This article appears in Outlook Magazine바카라�s June 21, 2025 issue, Innings/Outings, which captures a turning point in Indian cricket 바카라�from retiring legends to small-town stars reshaping the game바카라�s power map. It appeared in print as 'The Incredible Shrinking Game'.