To me yesterday signaled the death of Test Cricket. Not because of the fiasco that the Indian-Australian Test Series has become, but instead because of the rise of the Twenty20 format.
This week I have had the privilege to witness two days of tense , exciting cricket. The first was Day 5 of the India-Australia Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground. A battle between two superpowers featuring some of the greatest players to have ever played cricket. The other was a Twenty20 game between New South Wales and Queensland at ANZ Stadium. A game for which both teams were missing a host of their best players, with only four or five notable players taking the field .
Which game got a bigger crowd? Gut instinct would say that the Test Match would have won hands down. Strangely enough the Domestic Twenty20 won hands down. It pulled in 23,000 patrons vs. just 10,000 for the last day of the Test (of whom 8,000 were members whose attendance at the game did nothing to fill Cricket Australia's coffers). This is despite the hyped up media frenzy surrounding the Test - in stark contrast to the seeming blacklist on coverage of the Twenty20 game.
To put it all in perspective the average Domestic Game (50 Over or Four Dayer) draws a crowd of 1000-3000. How can longer forms of the game hope to stay alive in the face of the Twenty20 onslaught? The short answer is that, barring some serious innovation on the part of Cricket Administrators, it can't.
