This is not the beginning. Well, it is. Although, it never really feels like it. The County Championship eased into gear this week in a way that always seems startling, that for all its buds of life, always feels a bit like death.
Here it comes now out of the half-yearly gloom, that familiar tableau of white on mulchy green, the long spring shadows, with a sense from Old Trafford to Cardiff to Chester-Le-Street of something happening just below the daily noise, of scorecards to pore over, skittish runs, gallows humour, newspaper shots of triple-sweatered shapes against clanky steel and plastic stands.
This is nothing new. Everyone knows county cricket turned into a Larkin poem some time ago; all shadows, meadows, carved choirs, and that sense of a very English kind of dwindling, cut through with throbs of vibrant life. Yorkshire are in turmoil. Yorkshire are on the verge of liquidation. But Yorkshire are also 283 for three and a 20-year-old from York is flipping gliding and skimming the ball around Headingley in the April sun because life will still continue to happen.
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Talking of which, on the same day Somerset versus Warwickshire was being washed out without a ball bowled (damp outfield) something else was happening 5,000 miles away. There has never been anything in cricket quite like an IPL daytime match. Kolkata Knight Riders versus Royal Challengers Bangalore was the ninth game of 74 at this year’s expanded tournament, just another note in the schedule. In the event it was one of those occasions that just seems to drip with event glamour, colours bleeding into one another, the air thick with a constant static.
Early on David Willey floated a pitch-kissing in-nipper on to Venkatesh Iyer’s middle stump and then whirled around like a kitten chasing a midge swarm as the place just dissolved around him. And watching this happen it was impossible not to feel a leer of hope for this strange, ever-evolving sport.
Back in England the Ashes will soon be upon us, five Tests across six weeks with the promise of renewal and fresh eyes. For all the death-in-life stuff of an April start, this is still the beginning of something. But it is also the beginning of the end. It is tempting to glaze over a little whenever anyone starts to talk about the end of Test cricket. This is a sport that thrives on dying, that seems to have been dying, with a robust sense of theatre, since the day it was born. But this thing is actually happening now. That ice shelf really is shearing off right in front of us. Welcome to the last great summer of Tests.
Just take a look at the future tours programme. From February 2027 to mid 2031 there are six combined white ball world cups and five IPLs. In the same four-year period just six five Test series are due to take place anywhere in the world. South Africa have just two three-Test series scheduled between now and 2031, when Kagiso Rabada will be 35.
India still like a five-Test series, although only against England and Australia, and only the shotgun back-to-back series. The Ashes will continue to navigate through this, completing its evolution into a kind of Ryder Cups style event, kept afloat by its grey pound revenue, the sporting equivalent of all-inclusive cruise holidays to the Norwegian fjords or those adverts for beige elasticated chinos in the back of Sunday newspapers.
And there will of course be other Tests played, but these are mainly bitty two-match affairs, players undercooked or absent, ageing specialists dying away. There is no energy, no market force, no publicity, no gravity of any kind drawing cricket’s talent pool towards the red ball product. What we have here is managed decline, Test cricket treated like the block of flats the local council allows to decay until finally it has all the excuses it needs to cut its losses and pull the whole thing down.
This is why it is significant the IPL now fully overlaps with the English domestic season, that it has extended into a six-month block of global leagues. This energy source is already driving every structure below it. It’s present in the way coaching happens at the most basic level, there in the way England players are already refusing the chance of an ODI cap to play in franchise leagues. Will Smeed, who will make a wonderful living from being able to polo mallet sixes into the stands, has retired from red ball cricket having never played a game of red ball cricket, because, frankly, only one of these things looks like the future.
This is not intended as the usual tale of decay, of the good is all gone, the bad is all to come. The IPL is a brilliant thing, and a gift to the sport. T20 at that level – although in no sense at every level – is a game of thrillingly refined skills. A day after RCB v KKR there was a chance to watch Sanju Samson whip-cracking the ball over cover with an impossibly graceful sense of ease. It is the annihilating hunger that feels alarming, the sense with the big franchise leagues that all other forms must be swallowed rather than nourished or accommodated.
Even now the IPL is casting a shadow over the Ashes. Ben Stokes is opening the bowling when, frankly, he really should have his knee up on the chaise longue. Steve Smith is refining his Dukes ball technique by doing Indian TV commentary.
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And what kind of market force is at work here anyway? It is genuinely astonishing that from a standing start the IPL is the second richest TV sport product in the world, second only to the NFL. The IPL lasts two months and has zero cut through outside of India and a few other countries. None of the teams have any value globally. How can the thing Jimmy Neesham plays for eight weeks be more valuable than the thing Lionel Messi plays for eight months?
The total commitment – the sporting nationalism – of two billion people comes into it. Above all this is a format designed specifically to absorb advertising, cricket reimagined as a billboard, present even in the things the TV commentators are saying. Is this the right way for sport to evolve?
Who knows what an Ashes four years from now is going to look like, how vital the whole experience will feel. So enjoy those six weeks from June into July, suck the sweetness out of it. It already feels a bit like the last of something.
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