Large as the Ageas Bowl is, and loud as Sunday’s crowd were, Joe Root’s voice carried right across the outfield, “Jonny,” he said again. Down at third man, Jonny Bairstow turned and gave him a wave of his hand. “One second,” the gesture said. Bairstow had just stepped over the boundary rope between deliveries to talk to the children huddled behind the hoardings, four girls, four boys, all of them holding out match programmes, miniature bats and scorecards for him to sign. Away in the middle, Bairstow’s teammates waited while he signed one more and then promised the rest he would come back to do theirs later. The kids waited for him.
Whoever first decided to lay this ground down in the Hampshire sticks, six miles outside Southampton, must have been thinking of that line from Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” At some point they decided that they needed more than a cricket pitch and a few grandstands to bring in the locals. There must be more sideshow attractions here than there are at any other ground in England.
There is a climbing wall and a laser tag tent at one end and a golf course at the other and, in between, the two stalls where you can test your fielding and chipping and putting. If you really wanted to, you could pass a day at the Test without stopping to watch a single ball. It is a strange set-up – as if they wanted to design a stadium to appeal to people who are not really all that interested in the sport they play there.
On Sunday the tees were empty, the climbing wall was bare and the laser tent deserted. It was a gift of a day for a Test-match fan, in the September lees of the long, hot summer and, apart from the autograph hunters, the thousands who were here were not about to leave their seats.
Since England’s innings was settled so quickly the set-up was simple and the match perfectly balanced. India needed 245 runs, England needed 10 wickets. Everyone knew that, however the match was going to unfold in the hours ahead, every ball would be worth watching.
The sorry part was that the ground was not full or anywhere near it. There were rows and rows of empty seats in the temporary stands. Tickets cost £50 on the day and £10 for under-17s and it was £20 just to get in for the last session of the day. Hampshire were more worried about their balance sheet than they are about filling the seats.
Four weeks back, before the start of the second Test. The ICC’s chief executive, David Richardson, gave the Cowdrey Lecture at Lord’s. Richardson mostly spoke about sportsmanship, a safe topic, one everyone agrees on and for which the ICC has some ready solutions Richardson could point to. But afterwards, in his Q&A, he took on a couple of trickier issues – like the state of Test cricket. Richardson spoke about the ICC’s plans for the Test match championship, which will start next year. Then he said that the key change he wants to take place is the way Test cricket is marketed.
In essence Richardson was asking for the national boards to put as much effort and energy into selling this format as they do their T20 leagues, to show as much consideration for the fans as Bairstow did when he held up the game for a second so he could sign those autographs.
The match was still in the balance then. India needed another hundred runs and had five wickets left. Ajinkye Rahane was settled at one end, three hours into his innings, and at the other Rishabh Pant had just smeared six runs down the ground.
When it was all over, Root said he felt the match, and the series, had shown “Test cricket is alive and kicking and still very much the pinnacle of the sport”.
It is a shame the people who run the game do not always seem to treat it that way. Take the ECB, which seems preoccupied with concocting some new crackpot hundred-ball competition to try to win over a market that its focus groups insist exists. As if this, the pinnacle of the sport, was just some fringe pastime for rich eccentrics, that there is no hope of persuading anyone who has not discovered the sport already to be interested in it, even when it provides the kind of twists and turns seen between India and England this summer.
It is a pity, too, that the BCCI thinks the best way for its team to prepare for this series was by playing a single three-day warm-up game, an approach that makes Test cricket seem almost like an inconvenience and meant that it took most of their side, with the exception of Virat Kohli, two matches to come into the sort of form that could challenge England.
For all their flaws, these two teams have produced a brilliantly entertaining series, one that deserved to be played in front of full houses every day and one that, if the two boards tried a little harder, could and should have captivated the country.
