Test cricket and the English: Your Test for our cotton, natives!

There’s something I’ve realised about Test cricket and the English. It is sacred to them. As sacred as The Empire, the Netflix show The Crown, or Downton Abbey. Test cricket, for the English in circa 2021, is the ultimate culmination of British old things – Pimm’s No.1, the gin-based ‘fruit cup’; the lush greens, the flannelled whites, slow-clapping, the sunset on the red ball, Lord’s, a thoughtful defensive shot, BBC radio commentary…. All from a world 100 years ago, when they ran the world.

They love it. If emotion is shown while watching a Test match, it is manifested by a silent ‘ahem’, when, say, a fielder dies due to cardiac arrest.

And playing them throughout the summer was us. The loudest richest cricketing nation on the planet where Test cricket is watched by grandads and the homeless. Where the

siren rules every second, when the viewer has not been swamped by 11 Byju ads while the bowler is taking his run-up, and the slowest applause is a cheerleader doing headstands.

The aggression of this new Indian cricket team probably emanates from the sadness that they cannot take loaded weapons on the field to respond to the slightest of English sledgings. We have taken a 19th century Victorian game and turned it into a 21st century Noida traffic brawl.

It was only a matter of time before the two worlds and the two kinds of cricket clashed. And it happened, aptly, at the deciding India-England Fifth test at Old Trafford, Manchester. And beautifully, with Ravi Shastri (of course) in the mix.

Cancelling a Test match to the English is like desecrating a statue of Winston Churchill. That the England Cricket Board did not declare war is testimony to the fact that India is now the old East India Company, and all the cricket money is now, unlike during the Brit Empire, flowing west to east. Or at least east enough to Dubai, which is basically Mumbai-minus-Covid. That makes the BCCI, Robert Clive, I suppose.

And if indeed the battle over the last Test at Lord’s was the Battle of Palashi – that cricket-watchers on both sides still insist on calling ‘Plassey,’ the equivalent of calling Gloucester ‘Glau-chester’ – then it is the English Cricket Board that is now colonised, making India the new ruler of the cricketing empire. However, colonial masters must commit colonial atrocities, which we are now gleefully doing by cancelling Tests.

Blaming the coach’s Covid for going to his book event, or the physio ‘who was touching the players all the time’ (sic), are lovely excuses. The real reason, apparently clear, is that the cash mountain that the IPL is will not be disturbed just to please English nostalgia-mongers, even if it means leaving the cricket field abruptly with the bat and ball because you own both. (Incidentally, we should celebrate any contact that Ravi Shastri has with books.)

There was no better example of IPL world cricket domination than when the IPL teams sent private planes to fetch their players from England to Dubai, while the England cricketers grumpily went home, harbouring some outdated notion of playing for the ‘honour of their nation’ (suddenly England, not Britain), on crowded local trains.

The BCCI and its ‘national’ (men’s) team are now like imperial Rome. And everyone that does not bow to them will be bankrupt. Or dead. If indeed we have so much power in world cricket, why limit ourselves by just cancelling one Test? Why not keep all other cricket boards on their toes by not knowing what we might do during a future foreign series?

Perhaps in the middle of the next Australia series, we could declare Day 3 will be for Bollywood dancing, and all the Australian players will have to participate. Or in the middle of a Test, the whole Indian team heads to a sauna. With no one to oppose this, the future of Test cricket is promising.

The writer performed his stand-up show, ‘Democracy and Disco Dancing’ at the Soho Theatre, London, on September 6-11, the week the Old Trafford Test was cancelled. Highly suspicious