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Steve Kilgallon is a Stuff reporter and a big cricket guy.
OPINION: What was it? I’d had an abortive attempt to deduce it on day two of the test, and given up after six attempts. I’d completely forgotten my Spark Sport password. I was paying for it, but I couldn’t actually see the cricket.
When test match cricket shifted to Spark last year, they lost me as a customer. In a hairshirt, this-will-hurt-me-more-than-it-hurts-you way, I refused to pay a second sports TV subscription and anyway, I was sick of all the ways test match cricket conspires to make you stop watching (more of this later).
Then Spark got the Rugby League World Cup and my iron resolve crumbled; and then it was cricket time, and I decided not to cancel.
Finally, on day five of the Wellington test on Tuesday, I determined to sit there and, like a safe-breaker, keep trying combinations until Spark let me in.
READ MORE:
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* Fans still grumble but New Zealand Cricket ‘delighted’ with Spark Sport numbers
This is a roundabout way to saying that I finally saw some test cricket on television again yesterday, and wasn’t it marvellous to be back.
It was from the Basin Reserve, which everyone knows is a fine place for a cricket game. It was one of those Good Days in Wellington, which made it better. There was a test match poised for a result between two teams who have made a collective decision to play decisively and with a smile on their faces.
I was, of course, also meant to be working, but there’s always a pleasant second-serve-of-pudding guilt to watching cricket on someone else’s time (my personal peak of this feeling came once a year as a kid, when my dad would smuggle me out of school on the opening morning of the annual test match at Headingley, regardless of what the teachers thought).
My boss isn’t just reading this, he’s sub-editing it, so to be clear I was watching whilst reading the transcripts of a High Court trial (and then the kids came home and wanted to watch Power Rangers, so I can’t offer complete ball-by-ball analysis).
Andrew Cornaga/Photosport
The final moment: Wagner appeals, Anderson knows the game is over.
But a glance at the messages arriving in my T20 cricket team’s WhatsApp group suggests that while they were all meant to be fixing IT stuff, selling industrial sidings and doing engineering things, they clearly weren’t giving that their 100 per cent focus either.
A former teammate was essentially live-tweeting the whole thing. It felt like everyone everywhere had downed tools at once as the game became increasingly absorbing.
Cricket tragics will know this particular script, but for those with a more passing acquaintance with the game’s administration, let me tell you it does everything it can to loosen your affections.
There’s way too much T20 cricket, which offers a saccharine burst of same-same slogging and engineered results, and a big raft of 50-over-cricket, which does basically the same thing just a bit slower.
Obviously, there’s that short-sighted decision to shift the game on to a platform hardly anyone had. Then there’s the calendar, which has no sensible structure beyond being whatever India, England and Australia wants, which means New Zealand often don’t play test matches at home when we’d like them to. There’s our stadia shambles, which means none of it is ever played in Auckland, where I live, because there’s nowhere to play it.
I’m the sort of person test cricket should never have lost. I grew up playing and watching the game. At 44, I’m still playing midweek cricket (and very occasional games on a Saturday when they need a wicketkeeper). I can still tell you who’s in the New Zealand team.
It drew me back on Wednesday, because when it’s good, it’s unbeatable. Test cricket has lots of unique wrinkles that make it ripe for all those old cliches about Americans not understanding how you can play for five days and not get a result, and Groucho Marx turning up and saying: “this is great, when does it start?”
It’s complex and complicated, not entirely easy to understand for the novice, but rewarding once you understand all the interlocking layers of tactics and possibilities. One of my cricket teammates, Will Evans, said: “There’s so many storylines and ebbs and flows in a five-day test match that make it so engrossing and compelling.”
“Most good sports have drama which can happen quickly,” says another, Dean Pudney. “But this game had crescendoing drama. There’s that building tension on every nuance, all building to that climactic end.”
Phil Walter/Getty Images
One of those moments: Tom Blundell runs out Harry Brook.
This match had lots of storylines.
A constant flow of potentially pivotal moments (Michael Bracewell’s dropped catch, Harry Brook’s run out), little subplots like England aggressively forcing Bracewell’s potentially-damaging offspin out of the attack, New Zealand ‘keeper Tom Blundell standing up to the quick bowlers to limit that aggression, England’s last real batsman, Ben Foakes, farming the strike to protect his tailenders – then a final, absorbing battle between the pugnacious Neil Wagner and one of cricket’s most likeable men, Jimmy Anderson.
I had wrested the remote back from the kids by that stage, called them into the room with a few runs to go and tried to explain what exactly was going on. The oldest got it. The youngest two looked entirely bemused when Anderson nudged that final ball down legside into Blundell’s gloves and I began shouting at the television.
Cricket being cricket, there is, of course, no third test between these two teams. That would make far too much sense. Economists would perhaps call it scarcity value: if you had days like these every day, then maybe they wouldn’t be so exciting.
Combine the lack of test cricket with the rarity of a finish quite like this, then day five at the Basin was worth millions.
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