In this morning's Dominion Post (no online version I am afraid), Jonathan Millmow launched into Bangladesh and called for their expulsion from the test arena in very strong terms. Meanwhile, Martyn Watterson wrote a piece for NZPA which tells how much the people in this impoverished country love their cricket and how eager they are to improve.
As everyone knows, it took New Zealand 26 years to win its first test match. So we should be the last to call for Bangladesh's expulsion. And our record prior to that first win could have been even worse because for many years we were only allowed to play three day test matches and escaped with draws in games we would otherwise have lost.
International cricket is now too comfortably uniform to allow the five day test to be tampered with - you might as well try to re-introduce the eight ball over. But I think there might be a good deal of merit in the idea of tampering with the length of games. Test matches with Bangladesh are currently lucky to last four days. A three day test match would give them something achievable to aim for - an honourable draw. And their opponents would have to fight that much harder to win. There would be no batting for two days to set up a huge total - sides would have to score more quickly and declare earlier against them - and teams would have to bowl well to get them out twice in such a short space of time.
You could argue that a three day test match would make it even harder for Bangladesh to win their first match. But I don't think it would at all. Their opponents would be rushed and more likely to make mistakes, and declarations would be more sporting and more likely to offer a chance of victory.
The recent test series between New Zealand and Bangladesh was a predictable bore. But imagine what might have happened if we had played three day tests rather than five day matches. With 30 minutes to go at the end of day three of the last match, Bangladesh were eight wickets down. They managed to fight out those last 30 minutes, but that merely put the match into day four. Think of how tense and exciting that 30 minutes would have been if the result had been hanging on them. New Zealand would have been desperate to get those last wickets. Men would have been crowding the bat. The Bangladeshis would have been fighting hard, knowing that they only had to last seven or eight more overs. It would have been test cricket at its finest.
Thursday, 4 November 2004
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ON a slightly related note, Kyle Mills and Chris Cairns have been laying into the Bangaldeshis over the quality of their pitches. Frankly, this is hypocritical given the quality of the pitches New Zealand has offered up for international matches over the last two seasons. The season before last was a low-point and an embarassment (I recall before one test at the Basin Mark Richardson expressing surprise at the groundsman watering the pitch three days out and after a period of heavy rain).
I also think Millmow is being a tad pathetic - it took both Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe a number of years to become competive (and arguably, since the loss of Andy Flower, Zim are no longer competitive). To go from winning a couple of one-dayers over a number of years to winning a test match after three years is nigh-on impossible. However, their decline in the one-day game is worrying and maybe they should be made to play in the second-tier one-day tournaments with the likes of Netherlands, USA, etc. Without taking away their test status.
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