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To grow up watching England’s cricketers is to wish that they had a secret superpower. Now it turns out that they really do. They may be only the fifth-best team at winning Test matches but they rule the world when it comes to taking part. Tomorrow, when England play India in the First Test at Edgbaston , they will become the first nation to play 1,000 Tests. Their old foes, the Aussies, are a distant second on 812. We are the champions, my friends.
Not that you would know it from recent results. Joe Root’s England have been crushed in Australia, narrowly beaten in New Zealand and held to a draw at home by Pakistan. Tomorrow they start a five-Test series against the world’s top-ranked team on surfaces so sun-dried that the Indian spinners are licking their lips.
But let’s stop moaning, for once, and bask in this achievement. Cricket lovers are programmed to like certain things, including lunch, tea, floppy hats and round numbers. No Test team has ever rattled up a thousand before. England may not be the best team in the world but they are, incontrovertibly, the busiest.
And they’ve done more than anyone to sustain the greatest form of the game. A Test isn’t just a test: it’s a saga, a box set, an epic poem. It lasts five whole days, and sometimes the drama doesn’t bubble up until the final afternoon.
A Test is a series of fierce duels disguised as a social occasion. To turn up for all five days you have to be either crazy or working there; to go for one day is just right. As you take your seat the pace of life slows, even though the ball is moving at 85mph. You and your friend, or father or son, mother, daughter or godchild, find yourselves having the sort of conversation that otherwise comes only on long car journeys — meandering, intermittent, pressure-free, gently revealing.
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Behind the thousands who attend a home Test stand millions tuning into Test Match Special in the kitchen or slyly following a blog in the office. Cricket, which looks so traditional, is actually a wily operator, bending each new medium to its will. Its outstanding correspondents — from the astute Mike Atherton to the venerable, if not so pronounceable, Scyld Berry — publish their opinions soon after the close of play. Its leading website, Cricinfo, is a powerhouse. If Ben Stokes takes a great catch, the clip is on Twitter in two minutes. This ancient antiquated game, born in 1877, is alive and clicking.
Football may have the stronger club system but cricket organises internationals better. Every Test goes down in history, every run in the ledger. England’s most prolific batsman and bowler, Alastair Cook and Jimmy Anderson , are both playing tomorrow — a pair of living monuments.
If Test cricket didn’t exist, nobody would dream of inventing it, which is part of its magic. Asked once if cricket was a metaphor for life, Harold Pinter was shocked. “If anything,” he growled, “it’s the other way round.”